Cactus Pears review – tender and subtle story of forbidden love and a poignant awakening in India

The strictures of family and class stand between two young men and their humble dreams of happiness in an assured directorial debut from Rohan Kanawade

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed. It is a story of forbidden and unacknowledged love, or maybe semi-forbidden and semi-unacknowledged, and an emotional flowering that reveals the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old Mumbai call-centre worker who must return to his remote home village when his father dies, where he is expected to stay for the full 10-day mourning period, an absence for which he must grovellingly apologise to his boss over the phone. His dad’s final words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him a really nice meal, and the poignancy of that request is cleverly revealed by Kanawade in the later scene in which Anand’s elderly, blind grandfather reminisces about why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated Suman in the first place.
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