Colossal and the hometown demons: When returning to familiar places means confronting pain, and considering redemption

The Viewfinder is a fortnightly column by writer and critic Rahul Desai, that looks at films through a personal lens.

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The “hometown” is a knotty emotion. Some of us perpetually straddle that thin line between visiting the place, and returning to it. It feels like a visit – an obligation of sorts – when life is moving full steam ahead. Where we come from loses a bit of meaning once we know where we’re going; history becomes a memory when the future looks certain. The movies subscribe to this image. So many coming-of-age stories revolve around big-city protagonists who face hometown hostility during an unplanned visit. Lanes from one's childhood look narrower, the people sound crabbier, the thinking feels smaller.

It’s usually a family tragedy that sets the stage. Brooklyn, starring Saoirse Ronan, is a famous example. The death of a sister forces a young immigrant in 1950s New York to put her future – a new job, a sweet Italian boyfriend – on indefinite hold. The moment she arrives back in her small Irish town, she gets sucked into the quicksand of her past. Her needy mother guilts her into staying, and sets her up with a handsome bachelor. It takes a chance encounter with a petty face from the archives to jolt her out of her reverie. She terminates her visit before it’s too late, returning to Brooklyn an enlightened soul.

A character in Seema Pahwa’s directorial debut, Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi, is confronted with a similar conflict. Among all the family members who’ve gathered at an ancestral home in Lucknow to mourn the death of their patriarch, only the youngest son arrives from Mumbai. Parambrata Chattopadhyay’s Nishant and his actress wife Seema (Konkona Sen Sharma) look out of place during the 13-day ritual. A ‘modern’ Seema is the subject of bitchy barbs in the kitchen, while Nishant is visibly torn between appeasing the elders and soothing his anguished wife. It’s to the film’s credit that the grieving widow (Supriya Pathak) empathises with the couple. She sees her late husband in Nishant, recognising that he was never cut out for the restrictive frog-in-pond life.

Over the years, cinema has influenced my perception of my own hometown. I’ve felt like a misfit – unmarried, writer, broken family – during my annual visits. I’m often asked patronising questions (“Who’s your new girlfriend? Give us some Bollywood gossip?”), as though I’m an alien that has abandoned its original planet. As a result, I’ve resented old friends for being set in their ways. I’ve gotten irritated by my father’s emotional inertia. I’ve sulked at alcohol-free dinners. And I’ve mostly been relieved to take the flight ‘back’ to Mumbai. In my head, I’m the hero who outgrew his history.

But when life gets rough in the big city, the hometown becomes a sanctuary. A space of solace and recuperation, like the coolness of a dressing room during an innings break. This is when we return – battered, bruised, looking for roots and familiarity. And at times, closure. During my most recent trip, I thought of an unlikely film. Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal stars Anne Hathaway as Gloria, a New York-based writer whose alcoholism drives her back to her obscure New England hometown. Jobless and newly single, Gloria begins to work at her childhood friend Oscar’s (Jason Sudekis) bar, a decision that exacerbates her drinking problem. So far, so existential.

But here’s where Colossal becomes one of the most audacious, genre-fluid movies in the last decade. Gloria wakes up, hungover, in a nearby park every morning. As she stumbles across the playground, a Godzilla-like monster wreaks havoc on the other side of the globe, in Seoul. These two events look seemingly unrelated...until Gloria soon discovers she is the monster. She’s the unwitting puppeteer: her drunken movement through the playground manifests the creature in the Asian city. When she trips, the monster also trips, accidentally smashing into skyscrapers and killing hundreds of people. This sci-fi device doubles up as a moving metaphor: Gloria’s self-destructive actions have consequences beyond herself, causing irreparable harm to not just loved ones, but also innocent strangers (Imagine a pub brawl, for instance.). Gloria is mortified at the news images flashing from the faraway land. She finds ways to make the monster behave – and even apologise – to the puzzled Koreans. Which also means she must stop drinking.

Most addiction stories are straightforward about this epiphany. A car crash or jail-time throws the protagonist into a cycle of self-reflection. But the genius of Colossal lies is its construction of a language that is at once distant and intimate. It uses the sensory escapism of a creature movie as an expression – and a literal extension – of personal demons. My most recent trip was not an outcome of something so dramatic. I’m not an addict (unless you count caffeine), and I’m still very much a functional writer. But somewhere along the two weeks, my visit morphed into a return. For the first time in ages, I went on my own terms. Nobody was sick. There was no marriage, no reunion and no funeral. My agenda could afford to be selfish. The lockdowns had pummeled my mental balance; I needed respite from the same four walls, the same smells, the same silence. But once I was there, I started to recognise the damage from my previous visits. I saw people still scarred by the monsters I had manifested from all the passive aggressive behaviour, those cold shoulders and haughty texts. My “Kaiju” had wreaked havoc in spaces I barely knew. Even my father was cautious around me. I also felt like I was starting over with a few friends.

To control the monster, Gloria must master a sober stillness in the playground. I suppose my version of this was listening to – and not judging – those around me. Instead of expecting others to alter their schedules for me, I hopped onto their moving trains. I found a sense of calm in the sharing of time and space with people who continued living. I joined a friend and his wife on their evening drives and morning walks. I accompanied another for his mid-day coffee dashes. I spent an afternoon with another at her baking studio. I joined my father for his late-night movie sessions. They were the stories in motion, I became the peripheral experience. In the process, I started observing the little things about my ageing father. The way he eats like an overgrown bachelor: sloppily, impatiently, lavishly. The way his breathing assumes the rhythm of a conversation when he’s sleepy. The way his fading memory allows him to get surprised by the plot of a movie he’s watched before. The way he forgets but pretends to remember. The way he pauses before unsteadily getting up from the bed. Yet, none of this worried me anymore. I savoured these moments instead of trying to repair them.

Colossal also inverts another aspect of hometowns. Oscar seems like a humble, helpful guy at first. But he slowly reveals his toxicity to Gloria. He turns out to be the kind of friend who wants everyone to be as broken as him. He surrounds himself with vulnerable people: junkies, drifters, Gloria. His giant robot goes up against her monster in Seoul. He disrupts Gloria’s healing process, standing between her rubble and redemption. In those two weeks, it didn’t take long to learn that I was my own Oscar. I occasionally found myself lapsing into the bitterness of journeys past. I was on the verge of being triggered by my father’s opinions (“marriage promises stability”) or a friend’s preoccupied mind – an equivalent of a jealous Oscar forcing Gloria to drink with him and stay grateful for his help. I could feel my tone getting edgier. But then came the mental ceasefire. I’d bite my tongue and go for a walk around the old neighbourhood. I’d sigh at the cricket field that’s now a mall. I’d marvel at the school that’s still a school. And I’d realise that the lanes from my childhood feel narrower because I’ve grown colossally taller. The local voices sound crabbier because I’ve grown colossally quieter.

I hear my father yelling out my name from our third-floor window. Right on cue: seven o’clock. My first instinct is to chuckle at his nasal voice. But my name rings through the colony again. It sounds sharper. Maybe I’m in trouble. I imagine him waiting at the dining table with my math textbook. My friends wryly hand me my bat and ball. I don’t make eye contact. One of them teases me – “Rahul is a cheater” – in that annoying sing-song voice from the latest Shah Rukh blockbuster. But I resist. It’s time I returned home. I skip across the playground towards the stairs.

by Rahul Desai