When nine-year-old Jhalki’s (Aarti Jha) younger sibling, Babu (Goraksha Sakpal), is forced into child labour and modern-day slavery, she goes to painful lengths to free him from the clutches of carpet factory owner Ramnath (Akhilendra Mishra) and bring him home.
Born into a humble household – in a remote hamlet in Uttar Pradesh – Jhalki’s illiterate and financially-compromised parents are left with no other choice but to give up on their five-year-old son Babu. The child, in turn, is taken away to a far-off destination for ‘work’ in exchange for a meagre amount of money. But, Jhalki refuses to submit to their inevitable fate and tracks her brother down in a town that’s completely alien to her. But, is escaping human slavery as simple as it seems to this little girl? The answer to that question forms the crux of this story.
Writer-director Brahmanand S Singh deals with a subject that is both sensitive and socially alarming. The child artistes in this drama are natural performers when it comes to portraying the innocence of two battered kids. But, ‘Jhalki’ starts with a barter deal taking place between the poor residents and a local loan shark (Govind Namdeo) that seals the fate of many under-aged children in the village. And, 10 minutes into this social drama, you see a distraught sister pining for her kidnapped brother and looking for answers to questions that she doesn’t fully understand.
The tale in question is a concoction of plight with pathos, but it is told in a manner where the likability for the film diminishes with every sequence. Sure, Aarti Jha as a headstrong sister plays her part convincingly, but the director fails to establish a strong bond between the siblings on screen before their separation and hence, her determination to bring him home does not evoke any real emotion within the audience. Also, in a serious, issue-driven film like ‘Jhalki’, humour struggles to fit in and the scenes of comedy only take away from the seriousness of the narrative. The music, by Sandesh Shandilya, seems appropriate for an animation movie and does not add much weightage to the feel of this film.
‘Jhalki’ tries to drive home an important message and has its heart in the right place, but the execution is slapdash and the writing lacks the depth it needed.
