Dir: Rohan Parashuran Kanawade
India, 2025
Reviewed by Peter Herbert
Death in the family can bring people together as well as open up unspoken truths. Cactus Pears navigates this with gravity and grace through the premise of a film about the return of a son from the big city to a small rural Indian community.
Anand (Bushaan Manoj) is a single adult man accompanying his mother for the funeral of her husband. The visit is poignant as Anand grew up in the area, and there are now questions as to why he is without a wife. The truth of Anand’s sexuality, which is not clear from his life in the city, unfolds during 10 days in the country as he embarks on a ceremony involving the ritualised mourning of a son for his father.
So far, so good for the prodigal son until he meets his childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman) and senses a kindred spirit who is also without a wife. Anand begins to talk about his sexuality through the gentle, loving support of his mother, while Balya’s failure to marry provokes more aggressive behaviour from a family more deeply rooted in rural traditions. Anand takes up the offer to join Balya on his daily trek into the local hills to watch over a flock of sheep. It is during these sequences that the intimate connection and love between the two begin to flourish and will only be resolved when Anand returns to the big city.
The film avoids traditional camp Bollywood tropes and is based on the autobiographical experiences of director Rohan Parashuran Kanawade. It looks and feels like a companion to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, which also use natural sounds and outdoor settings to explore sexual and emotional awakenings away from the problems of the world.
Cactus Pears is a modest and quiet film, closer in spirit and style to that of Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country rather than the skilful dramaturgy of themes and ideas in both the Annie Proulx novella and Ang Lee’s film of Brokeback Mountain. Nor does it have the sweeping scale and scope of historical reference that enlighten the Hermanus film.
What it does have is the sensitive and earnest quality of a filmmaker who genuinely understands real-life pressures to conform within traditional Indian codes of sexuality and family. Kanawade argues that being queer is as much a universal human quality as any other, and Cactus Pears is a delicate fruit that, once the surface is peeled, reveals all its luscious taste.
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