An alcoholic father. His son. The hot, arid land of Tamil Nadu in India. This is Pebbles, P.S. Vinothraj's debut film which won the Tiger Award in the Rotterdam International Film Festival and is a nominee for the Golden Athena in the Athens International Film Festival.
The story is simple. Father, a damaged alcoholic man, takes his son from school and together they start a journey to find Mother, who after continuous beatings has finally left her husband. The first words that Father utters to his son are actually the question of whether he is going to stay with him or choose his mum. Just like that. Matter-of-factly. And this is all we need to find out about the man: he is curt, abrupt, uncivilized, obsessed with drinking and smoking and angry with everything and everyone. His goal is to take his wife back or to kill her in the process.
The unwelcome dry land of India is the third (or maybe the primary?) protagonist of Pebbles. Vinothraj follows his two leads with a constanly moving camera which focuses both on small details (drops falling from some basins or an unscrewed rod in a bus), and on the vast landscape of India. There are drone shots that show the loneliness and isolation that prevails as well as more poetic shots which aim attention at some leaves a girl throws in the sky or at the reflection of a mirror the boy carries. There are also some gruesome images of rats, being caught, having their legs broken and then grilled by a starving family living in the wilderness - images that I (and the film) could have done without.
The cinematography of Pebbles is one thing that really stays with you when it ends after just 76 minutes of duration. It is like you have taken a trip to some undiscovered (and certainly untouristy) part of India. You experience poverty and wretchedness, violence and calmness all at the same time. However, by the end of it, despite the experience, not much has happened and we leave the story and the place as ignorant as when we started it.
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