WHILE NOT an LGBT event, the Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) always offers plenty of grist for this magazine’s mill. My annual dash around P’town turned up several films that I found worthy of consideration for review. Here’s the final one of five.
CACTUS PEARS
Directed by Rohan Kanawade
Lotus Visual Productions, et al.
We leave Northern Europe behind at last for a passage to India, its climatic opposite, where manicured interiors give way to the crowded indoor-outdoor spaces of a hotter clime. Most of Cactus Pears takes place in a farming village a day’s train-ride from Mumbai, which is where the main character, Anand, resides. We meet Anand as he’s leaving home and traveling to the village of his father, who has just died and needs to be given a proper sendoff. According to Hindu custom, this is a ten-day affair that requires strict adherence to ritual practice, much of it involving Anand as the last unmarried son.
Indeed Anand’s marital status will be a major topic of discussion when he reunites with his extended family and in-laws. Among them is Balya, a handsome man about his age (pushing thirty) whom Anand hasn’t seen since they were teenagers. In many ways they’re a study in contrasts: Anand has a white-collar job in Mumbai, while Balya is a farmer who herds goats and does odd jobs. But they share one thing in common: both are having to cope with mounting family pressure to get married and make a family. And since they’re both resisting this pressure for the same reason, the possibility of a hookup hangs in the sultry air. It’s hinted that they may have fooled around as teenagers, but it still takes them a while to break the silence and make a first move.
Released in India this year, Cactus Pears may be seen as a plea for understanding and a challenge to the marriage imperative for men. To a Western audience, it’s a reminder that marriage has traditionally been an economic relationship and an arranged affair—both men’s relatives are actively looking for potential wives—a social expectation that we’ve largely left behind. Indeed the gradual shift to “marriage for love” in the West is probably what made same-sex marriage possible, and “love” is the argument that ultimately won people over. Whether this argument is strong enough to overcome tradition and keep Anand and Balya together becomes the question that propels this film to its conclusion.
