Barriers In Disco Dancer

“Maa chor, beta chor”, chant a chorus of Mumbai street-children as they tail a mother in a white sari, Radha, and her small son, Anil. Radha protectively pushes Anil infront of her as they walk home purposefully. En route, Anil threatens to throw a rock at a heckler, but Radha prevents this and pulls Anil along. After they enter their home, Radha starts crying. Anil, moved by this, grabs a knife and threatens to cut out each of the slanderers’ tongues. Radha calms him down. Suddenly, in the next shot, we are taken to a pleasant scene in Goa, where we are introduced to a handsome young man singing at a Christian wedding. This is no other than Anil, but as an adult.
This scene occurs at a critical juncture in the film “Disco Dancer”. It serves
as a bridge between Anil’s childhood humiliation and adult actions influenced by honor culture. Before this scene, Anil and Radha are humiliated by being falsely accused of stealing. Anil is deeply affected and tries to protect Radha. After the scene, adult Anil still seeks revenge for the insults he faced as a child and engages in several conflicts over honor. What is missing between these two points is an understanding of how Anil views his humiliation and honor culture. That is the main purpose of this scene - specifically to develop Anil’s understanding of three aspects of honor culture: vengeance, respect, and violence. This understanding allows him to understand his childhood humiliation and how to act on it as an adult. The dialogues alone half-heartedly convey this, but the true power of this scene is conveyed through the filmic combination of camera angles, prop use, transitions, and audio. This filmic strategy supports and strengthens how Anil’s views on honor culture are shaped. The camera’s careful positioning to focus on Anil’s face, the placement and use of a kitchen knife in combination with music, the use of abrupt transition, and the prominence of non-diegetic audio work together to properly convey Anil’s changing view on honor culture.
This scene’s camera techniques slowly bring us inside Anil’s head to see his character development with respect to vengeance and violence up close. At the beginning of the scene, the camera follows, but remains slightly in front of, Anil and Radha as they are being heckled. We are empathetic because the camera angles makes us walks along with them with the angry crowd in the background. However, once Radha pushes Anil into their home and starts crying, our view of the scene is blocked by a brown mesh screen. This distance is jarring because this is the first clear barrier between the audience and the characters used as a filmic element. Like the hecklers outside, we are removed from Radha and Anil. We no longer are forced to empathize. What we observe behind the mesh is Anil protected by his mother but it doesn’t elicit a powerful emotion. Here we see Anil helpless and like a little boy who needs nurturing.
Anil then breaks from his mother’s embrace and walks out of the frame.
The camera match cuts to another frame where Anil walks to grab a knife. But now there are no barriers! The lack of barriers shows that we are slowly being exposed to Anil’s private personality. He breaks the facade of a child who needs to be protected and won’t be complacent and let his mother suffer.Anil walks from the left to the right side of the frame before returning to the center with the knife and pausing. This shot is interesting because it shows the knife, not Anil, as the focal piece. In contrast, a continuous tracking shot captures Anil is walking back towards his mother, keeping Anil at the center of the screen throughout the shot. This continuity connects the bottled anger symbolized by the knife to Anil’s personal wish to protect his mother by returning to her. At this point, Anil thinks the way of avenging the insult to his mother is by violence, like with a knife. He ends his walk under the picture of Krishna, where his mother meets him. The tracking shot captures a change in lighting, from the kitchen, which is darker, to the entrance, where the primary lighting angle is different than the start of the scene as shown by the new shadows on the walls. This pulls attention to Radha’s important dialogue that there is no need for bloodshed and it only matters that Anil knows she didn’t
steal.