‘The Astronaut and His Parrot’ short film review: Never let me go

Arati Kadav’s lo-fi sci-fi is beautifully conceived, as tender and fleeting as life itself

In a short career, director Arati Kadav has found a distinctive voice, pioneering a unique brand of minimalist Indian indie sci-fi. It’s a style of filmmaking that always seemed on the horizon but—like the saucer in Nope—refused to materialize. Kadav’s films are low-budget and low-fuss (though they consistently feature mainstream actors). She keeps her production design lively and open; with the right cutters and a trip to the local DIY store, you feel you could put together your own sci-fi film as well. She isn’t vying for studio support­—or, perhaps more accurately, the studios aren’t vying for her.

This leanness of craft is reflected in Kadav’s storytelling, too. She has the ability to break characters and emotions down to the core elements; hers is a gentle, assured, lo-fi sci-fi. In Cargo (2019), her debut feature, an overworked spaceship agent found his hermetic solitude interrupted by a chirpy assistant. In the shorter length, 55 km/sec, lost lovers reconnected at the end of the world. Her latest effort, The Astronaut and His Parrot—running just 15 minutes and shot on an iPhone 12 Pro Max—is even sparer, a poignant space fable as tender and fleeting as life itself.

Birds have appeared briefly in Kadav’s earlier work. “There is a pigeon in the spacecraft,” complained Vikrant Massey, nonplussed, in Cargo. Now a parrot gets a starring role. After a terrible mishap, astronaut Iqbal Ali (Ali Fazal) is stranded and adrift in space; when he buzzes mission control, the signal gets lost. It’s picked up thousands of miles away in a temple town on Earth. With his oxygen fast depleting and not much hope left, Iqbal must make the most of his unlikely interlocutor — in this case, a rose-ringed parakeet that can talk.

Also Read: Into the afterlife: Arati Kadav and Shweta Tripathi on their latest sci-fi film, ‘Cargo’

It’s perhaps significant that the film does not open with Iqbal or show us his crash. That would signal a very different kind of space movie. The Astronaut and His Parrot has thematic similarities with Interstellar (2014). The film is candid about this fact; if anything, that’s its strongest suit, honing in on roughly the same emotions at 0.001% of the budget. Kadav, perhaps to seal the comparison, even throws in lens flares and a light drizzle of meteoric dust.

Elsewhere, she ducks the ruminative sadness of Christopher Nolan’s film by introducing sunny counterpoints. There is the funny central conceit of a man talking to a parrot (played by ‘Rio’, an Imtiaz Ali veteran apparently). There is Ali Fazal’s beanie-and-magenta-spacesuit getup. And there is Ali himself, one of those actors whose unruffled boyishness hasn’t faded despite a markedly long career in the movies.

The Astronaut And His Parrot played at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal last year. More recently, it was screened at the Wench Film Festival in Mumbai. Spearheaded by Sapna Bhavnani, it’s one of the few genre-forward festivals in the country; of the 23 films showing, only a handful were Indian, and Astronaut the only sci-fi title from India. This should surprise no one. There isn’t a market yet for intelligent, understated science fiction in India (tellingly, Kadav’s next feature is a remake of The Great Indian Kitchen). The road ahead looks long and lonely. For now, it’s mainly indie for Indian sci-fi.