His Father’s Voice is a 2019 drama about a gifted male dancer separated from his musician father in childhood who must return to him, to be able to dance again.
Indian films have sort become defined by the Bollywood wave; big, brashy action and musical films that take over-the-top to heights previously not thought possible. So it is that perhaps all Indian films – at least in Western eyes – might seem the same. However, naturally, that’s not the case, as evidenced by writer and director K. Kaarthikeyan‘s far softer, though certainly curious, effort, His Father’s Voice, a musical family film that will be undeniably hard to navigate for many even as a truly touching story slowly emerges from the collective tapestry of traditional music and dance.
A young man named Kris (Christopher Gurusamy) arrives in the far reaches of the Indian countryside, to a remote compound where a small family spend their time in the arts, painting, singing, and dancing around interpretations of Indian mythology and Hindu beliefs. He grew up here with his American father Jon (Jeremy Roske) and Indian/American mother Clara (Julia Koch), the couple embedded in the musical attachments of the community. However, the family came apart, as we slowly learn, with Kris spending most of the last twelve years in the United States, returning now to find his father, though his past is not easy to connect with and relationships a hurdle to rebuild.
Most of the film consist of large sections of interpretive dance as stories of Hindu Gods spoken in Sanskrit fill the time, one bleeding into the other as we journey back and forth between Kris’ childhood and his return. These two parallel paths are not initially made clear how they are connected, seeming at first as if they are of the same time before names and places begin to shape how one precedes the other. It’s actually the film’s best trick and once you get it, feels sort of rewarding.
This is a story richly steeped in lore and legends bound around the faith of the people at its core, and certainly, a population well beyond that. Kaarthikeyan is clearly devoted to telling these stories and interweaving their moral impact on a modern story of family and romance. Kris returns to find his childhood friend now a grown, beautiful woman Valli (Sudharma Vaithiyanathan), who has questions about her own family, and the film uses tales of the gods to overlay on the events of blossoming love and rekindling of familial bonds, giving the whole thing a kind of ethereal aura.
Glacially paced for film fans in the West, His Father’s Voice however is an interesting mix that has a solid family drama at its center about children in a failing relationship and the bridges necessary in reconnecting. As it is an Indian film – spoken entirely in English with songs in Sanskrit – it veers widely from the typical filmstyles audiences in the West will be used to, yet for just that, deserves a look simply for the value of cultural exploration. Set almost completely in the same small compound, it has sort of stage-play feel about it, with Kaarthikeyan keeping things purposefully gentle and subdued throughout, and while I’ll admit, I wasn’t always in tune with his narrative approach, found Kris’ journey, both physically and metaphorically, more engaging the further he went.