Natesh Hegde’s ‘Pedro’ is a beautifully mounted debut about a daily-wager who becomes an outcast

Spoilers ahead…

Gopal Hegde, the director’s father, plays Pedro with the awkwardness of someone who does not really belong – not to his family, not to his peers, not to his village, not even to himself.

Natesh Hegde’s Pedro is many things, as many things as you can read into its deliberately paced frames. But this is my favourite thing that the film is about: colour. Pedro is shot in a lush village in the Western Ghats, and to the naked eye, the scenery must be lovely. But through Vikas Urs’ brilliantly unshowy cinematography, the lushness is de-lushed. This isn’t the kind of picture where you will see a sunrise and some mountaintops and do a sharp breath-intake. This is about the sharp neon colours in a local bar, where the men are at their most natural state. How wonderfully strange that the “natural” state of these toxic men gets showcased amidst these most artificial of colours. Pedro is that kind of movie.

But Pedro isn’t one of these toxic men – not at first, at least. When we set eyes on this daily-wager, he is a mouse, calmly doing what his superior wants him to do: perched on an electric grid and carrying out some repair work. It’s raining. You can read something into the rain, too, which becomes its own character in key scenes: like the one where Pedro assaults a barber. So you could also say that Pedro is about what it takes for a mouse to become a tiger: “a menace not just to us but to the entire village,” as his employer says. This man – a very rich man – has hired Pedro to guard his land from wild boars and assorted creatures of the wild. And that sets the plot in motion.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galatta.com/kannada/movie/review/pedro/

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