Sud pralad (2004)'s activity

With a genuine excitement about a movie hailed as a striking and engrossing experience, not least in the LGBTQIA+ genre, I was ultimately let down by the filmmaking itself. Even if the idea might have been fine, the two halves of the movie were difficult to reconcile. I also found the sound design and mixing to be on the lower end - you could barely hear the dialogue, and most of the sound was pretty much just crickets chirping. Of course, this adds to the overall ambiance of the jungle depicted so heavily in the movie but I missed an even slightly more crisp experience.

However, the love story was refreshingly unproblematic and undramatic to me. Usually, we have to deal with quite a lot of intensity when watching an LGBTQIA+ work of art, but in this case, it went by mildly like a gentle spring breeze. You might say that the dramatic part of the story unfolds in the second, feverish part of the film, but it doesn't hit you over the head with a dark thematic.

It won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004, but I doubt that this has withstood the test of time. The film doesn't require much from its audience, but it is choppy and uncomfortable at best.