Close Enough: Documentary on a Kerala man with blindness asks for no sympathy

Honesty has a peculiar charm especially when it seems to stumble out of you, unplanned and unrehearsed. Archana Vasudev had not told her father anything except that she wanted to make a film about him, his life, and his immediate response was, why not. At their family home in Kerala’s Tirur, he let her film his day from early morning to night, his voice turning into the narrator’s and the protagonist’s.

Archana, who has experience scripting short and feature films, was directing one for the first time, and had no clue how her father, blind in both eyes, would respond when the camera switched on and she asked her questions. But it came out so smoothly, so raw, that she fell at ease and her documentary was shot in less than a week.

Close Enough: The Way I See It has already had international screenings in the US and will also have shows in Greece and Moscow.

“I chose that title to say everything was close enough for my father, having been blind in one eye since his birth, and losing the sight in his other eye years ago. He never even told us about it for a long time,” Archana tells TNM.

She had an idea to document his life, having witnessed the peculiar way he lived it, but did not know how or when it should be. Archana realised there was a story waiting for her at home after a script that she had worked for two years failed to materialise and she was made to feel she was “only the writer” and helpless without the others. This was after the feature film anthology Her that she scripted and Lijin Jose directed in 2023, which portrayed the goings-on in the lives of five very varied women.

In one of the segments from Her is a character played by Pratap Pothen that was partly inspired by her father, in which he becomes exceedingly dependent on the virtual assistant tool Alexa, making his wife (Urvashi) jealous. PV Vasudev, Archana’s father, with his zero vision, fell in love with the device that could guide him everywhere. Before that, he had embraced audiobooks, having always been an avid reader and missing it as his vision – even with a zooming lens held over his glasses – failed to pick up the letters in a book. 

“I remember seeing him read like that, even though he never behaved like he had trouble with his sight,” Archana says. But she was sure, when she set out to make the film, that she was not going to make him look like a saint, that this was not going to be about a person with disability to be looked at with sympathy. 

“My father is an ordinary man and I wanted to portray him like that,” she says. But exactly for this reason, the way his ordinariness flows out of him, in minimal descriptions and drama, the film, with only a single man’s voice, draws you in. Like many men in his milieu – privileged caste and middle class – he had his way, but unlike most, he has come to admit his flaws (“had a drinking problem”) and appreciate the burden it left on his wife and children. There is a certain charm in this baring of his soul, especially when he refuses to be beaten by the past and gracefully tries to find happiness in the everyday. 

“I told him this film will not be preachy, he had never wanted sympathy. And he said on camera things he has never told us. None of the scenes had a second take,” Archana says. It is not all surprising considering he has always been good with communication skills, and in their little town, people still sought him out for help.

Vasudev mentions in the film how he had missed out on his daughters’ lives, not knowing that Archana liked theatre and reading and arts, much like him, and Arathy, the younger one, wanted to be a doctor. He was happy, Archana says, when she chose to study mass communication, for that was something he wanted to do, but could not because of his eyesight. But she didn’t take up journalism, and even though she did a lot of theatre in college, she chose a corporate job for financial security. Even when circumstances brought her back to the world of arts, she did her PhD in cinema, and taught at universities. She was in advertising as she scripted her first short film, Atmanirbhar. She still loves to teach and does it too, but filmmaking might just be the calling she missed answering for a long time.