For too long have mainstream romance movies told us that love is full of grand gestures, running through airports and yelling names (in an ever-tortured manner) up to balconies. Enter: Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Cactus Pears (Sabar Bondi in Marathi), a beautiful heartbreaking queer romance that reminds us how love is in the quiet moments, in the beauty of silence and the gentle beauty of belonging.
The film follows Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) who returns from Mumbai to his family’s village in rural Maharashtra for the mourning period following the death of his father. Here, he reconnects with his childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman) and as the two men drift back into each other’s orbit, the film peels back the layers around grief, queer longing and emotional repression.
The film aches, most of all in the many moments of profound silence and stillness to the film. Parashuram Kanawade never reaches for melodrama, instead trusting that the utterly outstanding sound engineering and precise framing to do much of the work, allowing the acting performances to shine in their earnestness. The result is a film that whispers where others would shout, finding extraordinary emotional depth in the smallest of moments.
At its centre is a remarkably restrained performance from Manoj as Anand. He communicates almost entirely through absence and loss: a glance held a fraction too long, a fraught moment of hesitation before speaking, the exhaustion etched into every line into his face. It is an intensely internal performance built on strain and pain, one that captures the particular loneliness of someone who has spent years moulding their emotional life into something socially acceptable for his culture, his family and himself.
As a result, he simmers throughout, making you as the audience yearn for some, any, form of relief for him, no matter how that ending may come.
By contrast, Suman’s Balya is almost heartbreaking in the innocence that runs through his performance, a man never able to exist fully as himself, imposed upon by his family, denied any sense of traditional masculinity – or existence that feels true to him – by the people around him. Instead, he is most himself around the goats he cares for, and in the open air of the countryside. His bright-eyed performance (despite the trauma he has been through) is the perfect foil to Manoj, leaving you with a truthful portrayal that feels less acted and almost documentary-like.
Parashuram Kanawade’s eye lends itself to this: the camera observes rather than dictates, lingering on faces and spaces with a marked sense of voyeurism. There are multiple moments where watching the film feels like peering into moments never intended for an audience; as a result this naturalism gives the film its emotional gut-punch. Nothing feels performed for our benefit. Instead, we are invited to quietly bear witness to the truth of its characters.
There is no idealism behind the predominantly rural setting here, as is found in all too many films. The village offers no true liberation even as the men find themselves able to source moments of privacy under the open sky. It is a stark reminder that love lives and dies by the hearts of those that fight for it, not purely by the poetry (or lack thereof) of the setting.
Yet we must return to the sound design, with few films this year having utilised this so profoundly or effectively: this is a movie that must be watched in a cinema, or at least, with a fantastic sound system. From birdsong to breathing, sound becomes a crucial part of the film’s emotional language.
Shallow breaths, nervous exhales and moments of tactility reveal more than dialogue ever could. In a story where desire remains largely unspoken, breath, words unsaid and the power of touch (or lack thereof) becomes a form of communication, exposing vulnerability that would not be safe when spoken. Silence and stillness here is never empty. It is dense with feeling, a reminder that love can be most powerful in the in-between.
Whilst it is more important than ever to ensure that stories – and especially queer stories – have space to exist truthfully, Cactus Pears posesses a beautiful universality in how it addresses the barriers that prevent us from finding the kind of love everyone in the world has the right to experience.
Anand and Balya feel intensely specific, yet they also seem to stand in for many who have found themselves trapped between duty, social identity, family and desire. Their predicament is timeless whilst also understanding that queer loneliness is not simply an individual experience but one repeated across generations, carried quietly through lives fighting to not slip through the cracks.
Like its namesake, Cactus Pears is tender beneath the sharpness of its thorns. It is a film that devastates through stillness and its profundity; in a time so dominated by meaningless noise, its most wonderful achievement may be its confidence in stillness.
The result is one of the year’s most impactful love stories.
Cactus Pears is out on the 19th of June.