Part One: Unishe April
1995: Satellite channels and global network were beginning to make a home in middle-class households, though the revolution in the entertainment world that was to come in the new millennium was still beyond the imagination of the common man. The filmy khabar had not yet made its way to the headlines of news channels, and was still supplementary stuff. Yet news of Unishe April (April 19th) winning a few important national awards, amongst Best Film and Best Actor (Female), was quite a buzz in the town. Nobody knew who this Rituparno Ghosh was. However, the unusual title signalled a different film.
Films were still a strict “no, no” in our family. The latter looked upon films as low art, and the very act of watching them, if not blasphemous, certainly disparaging. I am a born film-buff, the ‘different’ thinker in an otherwise traditional and orthodox Bengali middle-class family. My family have always appreciated watching sports as a favourable pastime, while I have never been able to show them reason as to why both games and films are not really different from each other, both being different forms of ‘play’. There is essentially no difference between cheering Sachin Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan, both being entertainers (read ‘players’) in their own right. My family refused to understand. Under such circumstances cajoling my parents to take me for a movie was a Herculean task. But I was dying to watch the film.
In those days (Though I am not talking of prehistoric times, the revolution that has occurred in the sphere of entertainment was completely unforeseen even 10 years back; therefore, in that sense, the mid-1990s may be referred to as ‘those days’, lost days of innocence.), there was no way in which we could know anything about a film before its release. As I said earlier Indian media had not yet grown so proactively crazy about collecting news about films at that time. That Om Shanti Om was a potential hit and Sawaariya was to doze off at the box-office were known to the world within half-an-hour after the first shows of the two movies were over, thanks to the hyperactive news channels. In 1995, we had to wait for a week or even more to get a review of a film. But my enthusiasm for Unishe April was triggered off by an interview of Rituparno Ghosh that was aired on HMV-FM. Listening to Ghosh, I discovered I had never heard a man speak so sensitively or even for that matter so informally in a public space. Ghosh’s mild voice, his effeminate accents, punctuated remarkably the thoughts he shared. I found myself meeting a very different man. He was not like the other filmmakers. I had heard Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen before, and was awed by their wisdom. But I never struck a chord with them. Rituparno’s emotionally charged talk (not verging on the sentimental, mind you) almost seduced me into admiring him. The interview revealed that Unishe April was not his first film. He had stepped into the industry, almost unnoticed, with Hirer Angti (The Diamond Ring), a few years back. I at once recalled that I had seen the film on Television in Chhuti Chhuti (Holiday Fun), a programme that used to be aired on Kolkata Doordarshan for children during the vacation. I remembered that I liked the movie a lot. Unfortunately, I had not seen the name of the director, for I switched on the film after the title cards had been shown. The very making of the film underscored the fact (please note I was only 15 at that time, and had not sufficiently developed an eye for good movies) that it was made by someone who knew how to naturalise films, and use camera-angles which were not seen in the run-of-the-mill Bengali films of that time. The memories of Hirer Angti catalyzed my interest in Unishe April even more. I had to see the film!
Somehow, thank god, I convinced my mother to get tickets for Unishe April, assuring her that it was a good film, there were no explicit love-making scenes, and it had got the seal of our finicky (add ‘irritatingly’ before finicky) government in form of the national award. Interestingly, much later when Rituparno had become a household name, in a programme called Ebong Rituparno (With Rituparno), a talk-show aired on E-TV Bangla (long before Koffee with Karan became a chartbuster), he told Aparna Sen how he coaxed his aunt into taking him for Jay Jayanti (a Bengali film inspired by Sound of Music), convincing her that though it featured ‘adult’ movie stars Uttam Kumar and Aparna Sen, it was an out-and-out children’s film, and most of his classmates had seen it. I had to apply a different tactic (as mentioned above), for Unishe was in no way a children’s film.
Unishe was released at Minar, Bijali and Chhobighar, three of the oldest and bug-infested theatres of Kolkata. In spite of the bugs that worried us constantly, we could not really lose our concentration, once the curtains were up. Unishe tells the story of Sarojini (Aparna Sen) and Aditi alias Mithu (Debasree Roy), mother and daughter respectively. April 19 is the day on which Aditi’s beloved father (Boddhisatya Majumdar) had passed away. The story-line is a considerably unusual, for no Bengali film has ever dealt so poignantly with the tension between mother and daughter. Aditi’s oedipal hostility towards her mother is concretized when her dad passes away while Sarojini is away in Madras for a dance show. Aditi, a seven year old, continues to mourn her father’s death for 19 years, unable to erase from her mind the fact that mother was away when dad breathed his last. Fiendishly busy with her career, Sarojini can hardly spend quality time with Aditi who is left in the care of her dad, a not-so-successful doctor. Aditi develops abhorrence for her mother who she misses terribly as a child. The palpable absence of her mother fills her days while Bela (Chitra Sen), the house-maid, turns into her confidant, almost a surrogate mother. Sarojini barely makes an attempt to ‘know’ her daughter well, though this does not imply that she is nonchalant about her. The root of the problem lies in Sarojini’s refusal to give up her career as a dancer. Growing up with a chauvinistic father, Aditi fails to see the necessity of retaining the career, the necessity of trying to look at things from her mother’s perspective as well.
Sarojini’s predicament is akin to many women around us. Most of them are expected to strike a proper balance between the home and the world, failing which they are unthinkingly dubbed irresponsible. Aditi realises that towards the end of the film; by then, she had already decided upon giving up her career as a doctor, by burning the letterheads. She had almost spontaneously started defining herself with respect to Sudeep, her boyfriend (Prasenjit Chatterjee), a Mama’s boy. Sudeep’s refusal to tie the knot with her on the pretext of her mother’s being a dancer, prompts Aditi to attempt suicide. Aditi who had looked upon Sudeep as taking the place of her father in her affection, is terminally shattered, as it were.
Most of the time, we expect the person we love to return the love in the same manner. That’s human nature. What most of us forget is that love is not just an emotion, as some of us wish it were so, but a social relationship that is conditioned by everything we feel is not linked to love. Love is no sublime emotion, lifted out of normal processes of life. Unishe remains open-ended. It does not tell us whether Aditi accepts Sudeep or not. In fact, that is immaterial. Even if Aditi accepted Sudeep, and everything ended in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, what we know that Aditi has already loved and lost. She is into a lifelong compromise, a compromise most of us often willingly opt for as we continue to believe in this construct called love. Unishe, therefore, did not just tell the story of a temperamental doctor and her mother, but the story we write ourselves everyday through our actions. I saw myself in every frame of the film.
What made Unishe April a fresh breath of air is Rituparno’s attention to details, which is the hallmark of all his films. Aditi, interestingly, calls Bela, Boya. I can relate to this completely. My childhood inability to pronounce names correctly has lovingly stayed on, and I still call some of my closed ones by those names, even after I became fluent in two other languages apart from my mother tongue. Sudeep so closely resembles a friend of mine that when I saw the film for the first time I felt that he was lifted directly out of my own life. The way Sudeep talks, his concerns, his nonchalance — everything matched so miraculously with this friend of mine, it seemed that I was experiencing everything in a stupor. I vividly remember that after watching the film, my dad had commented that my temperamental and introverted nature matched Aditi’s. He had related to Aditi as he related to me in real life. There was one poignant scene where Sarojini tells her husband quite enthusiastically that she would like to replace a depressing calendar featuring a cat by their photographs. Her sense of interior décor is definitely better than her husband, but the latter dismisses her proposal almost insultingly. Indifferent to her tastes, he finds it embarrassing to have his photograph displayed for he is not as famous as his wife; and in any case, a calendar need not be removed simply because it featured a cat; for the cat hardly matters: calendars are meant for dates. I can completely relate to this. I have had enough quarrels with friends and colleagues who refused to see a possible marriage between utilitarianism and aestheticism. I have failed to reason out many who do not feel garnishing a dish is a necessity.
I saw Unishe April when I was in Class X. Today I teach in a college…it’s been almost 13 years! Yet, the impact of the film is still fresh. In fact, I have an emotional attachment with every Rituparno Ghosh film…for same, yet different reasons. Next comes Dahan.
1995: Satellite channels and global network were beginning to make a home in middle-class households, though the revolution in the entertainment world that was to come in the new millennium was still beyond the imagination of the common man. The filmy khabar had not yet made its way to the headlines of news channels, and was still supplementary stuff. Yet news of Unishe April (April 19th) winning a few important national awards, amongst Best Film and Best Actor (Female), was quite a buzz in the town. Nobody knew who this Rituparno Ghosh was. However, the unusual title signalled a different film.
Films were still a strict “no, no” in our family. The latter looked upon films as low art, and the very act of watching them, if not blasphemous, certainly disparaging. I am a born film-buff, the ‘different’ thinker in an otherwise traditional and orthodox Bengali middle-class family. My family have always appreciated watching sports as a favourable pastime, while I have never been able to show them reason as to why both games and films are not really different from each other, both being different forms of ‘play’. There is essentially no difference between cheering Sachin Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan, both being entertainers (read ‘players’) in their own right. My family refused to understand. Under such circumstances cajoling my parents to take me for a movie was a Herculean task. But I was dying to watch the film.
In those days (Though I am not talking of prehistoric times, the revolution that has occurred in the sphere of entertainment was completely unforeseen even 10 years back; therefore, in that sense, the mid-1990s may be referred to as ‘those days’, lost days of innocence.), there was no way in which we could know anything about a film before its release. As I said earlier Indian media had not yet grown so proactively crazy about collecting news about films at that time. That Om Shanti Om was a potential hit and Sawaariya was to doze off at the box-office were known to the world within half-an-hour after the first shows of the two movies were over, thanks to the hyperactive news channels. In 1995, we had to wait for a week or even more to get a review of a film. But my enthusiasm for Unishe April was triggered off by an interview of Rituparno Ghosh that was aired on HMV-FM. Listening to Ghosh, I discovered I had never heard a man speak so sensitively or even for that matter so informally in a public space. Ghosh’s mild voice, his effeminate accents, punctuated remarkably the thoughts he shared. I found myself meeting a very different man. He was not like the other filmmakers. I had heard Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen before, and was awed by their wisdom. But I never struck a chord with them. Rituparno’s emotionally charged talk (not verging on the sentimental, mind you) almost seduced me into admiring him. The interview revealed that Unishe April was not his first film. He had stepped into the industry, almost unnoticed, with Hirer Angti (The Diamond Ring), a few years back. I at once recalled that I had seen the film on Television in Chhuti Chhuti (Holiday Fun), a programme that used to be aired on Kolkata Doordarshan for children during the vacation. I remembered that I liked the movie a lot. Unfortunately, I had not seen the name of the director, for I switched on the film after the title cards had been shown. The very making of the film underscored the fact (please note I was only 15 at that time, and had not sufficiently developed an eye for good movies) that it was made by someone who knew how to naturalise films, and use camera-angles which were not seen in the run-of-the-mill Bengali films of that time. The memories of Hirer Angti catalyzed my interest in Unishe April even more. I had to see the film!
Somehow, thank god, I convinced my mother to get tickets for Unishe April, assuring her that it was a good film, there were no explicit love-making scenes, and it had got the seal of our finicky (add ‘irritatingly’ before finicky) government in form of the national award. Interestingly, much later when Rituparno had become a household name, in a programme called Ebong Rituparno (With Rituparno), a talk-show aired on E-TV Bangla (long before Koffee with Karan became a chartbuster), he told Aparna Sen how he coaxed his aunt into taking him for Jay Jayanti (a Bengali film inspired by Sound of Music), convincing her that though it featured ‘adult’ movie stars Uttam Kumar and Aparna Sen, it was an out-and-out children’s film, and most of his classmates had seen it. I had to apply a different tactic (as mentioned above), for Unishe was in no way a children’s film.
Unishe was released at Minar, Bijali and Chhobighar, three of the oldest and bug-infested theatres of Kolkata. In spite of the bugs that worried us constantly, we could not really lose our concentration, once the curtains were up. Unishe tells the story of Sarojini (Aparna Sen) and Aditi alias Mithu (Debasree Roy), mother and daughter respectively. April 19 is the day on which Aditi’s beloved father (Boddhisatya Majumdar) had passed away. The story-line is a considerably unusual, for no Bengali film has ever dealt so poignantly with the tension between mother and daughter. Aditi’s oedipal hostility towards her mother is concretized when her dad passes away while Sarojini is away in Madras for a dance show. Aditi, a seven year old, continues to mourn her father’s death for 19 years, unable to erase from her mind the fact that mother was away when dad breathed his last. Fiendishly busy with her career, Sarojini can hardly spend quality time with Aditi who is left in the care of her dad, a not-so-successful doctor. Aditi develops abhorrence for her mother who she misses terribly as a child. The palpable absence of her mother fills her days while Bela (Chitra Sen), the house-maid, turns into her confidant, almost a surrogate mother. Sarojini barely makes an attempt to ‘know’ her daughter well, though this does not imply that she is nonchalant about her. The root of the problem lies in Sarojini’s refusal to give up her career as a dancer. Growing up with a chauvinistic father, Aditi fails to see the necessity of retaining the career, the necessity of trying to look at things from her mother’s perspective as well.
Sarojini’s predicament is akin to many women around us. Most of them are expected to strike a proper balance between the home and the world, failing which they are unthinkingly dubbed irresponsible. Aditi realises that towards the end of the film; by then, she had already decided upon giving up her career as a doctor, by burning the letterheads. She had almost spontaneously started defining herself with respect to Sudeep, her boyfriend (Prasenjit Chatterjee), a Mama’s boy. Sudeep’s refusal to tie the knot with her on the pretext of her mother’s being a dancer, prompts Aditi to attempt suicide. Aditi who had looked upon Sudeep as taking the place of her father in her affection, is terminally shattered, as it were.
Most of the time, we expect the person we love to return the love in the same manner. That’s human nature. What most of us forget is that love is not just an emotion, as some of us wish it were so, but a social relationship that is conditioned by everything we feel is not linked to love. Love is no sublime emotion, lifted out of normal processes of life. Unishe remains open-ended. It does not tell us whether Aditi accepts Sudeep or not. In fact, that is immaterial. Even if Aditi accepted Sudeep, and everything ended in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, what we know that Aditi has already loved and lost. She is into a lifelong compromise, a compromise most of us often willingly opt for as we continue to believe in this construct called love. Unishe, therefore, did not just tell the story of a temperamental doctor and her mother, but the story we write ourselves everyday through our actions. I saw myself in every frame of the film.
What made Unishe April a fresh breath of air is Rituparno’s attention to details, which is the hallmark of all his films. Aditi, interestingly, calls Bela, Boya. I can relate to this completely. My childhood inability to pronounce names correctly has lovingly stayed on, and I still call some of my closed ones by those names, even after I became fluent in two other languages apart from my mother tongue. Sudeep so closely resembles a friend of mine that when I saw the film for the first time I felt that he was lifted directly out of my own life. The way Sudeep talks, his concerns, his nonchalance — everything matched so miraculously with this friend of mine, it seemed that I was experiencing everything in a stupor. I vividly remember that after watching the film, my dad had commented that my temperamental and introverted nature matched Aditi’s. He had related to Aditi as he related to me in real life. There was one poignant scene where Sarojini tells her husband quite enthusiastically that she would like to replace a depressing calendar featuring a cat by their photographs. Her sense of interior décor is definitely better than her husband, but the latter dismisses her proposal almost insultingly. Indifferent to her tastes, he finds it embarrassing to have his photograph displayed for he is not as famous as his wife; and in any case, a calendar need not be removed simply because it featured a cat; for the cat hardly matters: calendars are meant for dates. I can completely relate to this. I have had enough quarrels with friends and colleagues who refused to see a possible marriage between utilitarianism and aestheticism. I have failed to reason out many who do not feel garnishing a dish is a necessity.
I saw Unishe April when I was in Class X. Today I teach in a college…it’s been almost 13 years! Yet, the impact of the film is still fresh. In fact, I have an emotional attachment with every Rituparno Ghosh film…for same, yet different reasons. Next comes Dahan.
3 comments:
I first read the story (read it twicw in succession!) in Sharadiya Patrika. I was so touched by it that I remember narrating the story to my friends who are from non-bengali community.But alas!I missed the name of the writer.Later when the film came out, I saw it once and then again to analyze it. I must admit I have never been touched by a film so much that I went back to see a repaet show.There was an uncle of mine who was a film buff.We went to see it together and then can't stop discussing it for days.I even compared the new filmmaker with Mr. Roy for his wonderful eyes for details.
So I can quite relate your experience with mine.
And yes, I do remember seeing Hirer Angti in Chhuti Chhuti, liked the film but missed the name of the maker.
But I can clearly mark him as the next phenomenon after Satyajit Roy in Bengali cinema.
Your write-up on Rituparna Ghosh made for a trip down my own memory lane. I reminisced about those good old days after my Class X Board exams when I visited Minar on Bidhan Sarani with a didi and boudi to watch ‘Unishe April’. I was especially excited as it was the first Bengali film I was watching at a cinema hall after ages. As you have rightly pointed out, Rituparno revived the trend of going to movie-theatres among educated and culturally-oriented Bengalees, something that had gone missing owing to abysmal standards of Tollywood fare in the early 90s. - Debasri Basu
I remember the first time when i had seen the movie on television (probably Etv bangla),the first thing that struck me completely and left me speechless was the fact that how beautiful a film can be made with the sheer brilliance of its dialogues! I felt i was not watching a reel but a real life drama on display.The conversations between the characters seemed so natural and so much in sync with each other that u can relate to them instantly from someone you might ve come across in ur real life.
2 yrs back i had watched Bergman's Autumn Sonata and its said that Unishe april is loosely inspired by that film,but i could not find any resemblance between the two except the identical theme of mother-daughter relationship.Infact Unishe april is far more elaborate and descriptive in displaying the friction between the two lead protagonists unlike in Autumn Sonata where in one scene,the sudden outburst of Liv Ullman towards her mother Ingrid Bergman seemed very abrupt and coming out all of a sudden!
Unishe april also remains one of my personal favourite because of the huge persona called Sarojini Gupta!OH! how i loved her in the film ;) I just wish Aparna Sen too had received the national award along with Debashree Roy for this film!!For me, its an all time classic..
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