Mondomeyer Upakhyan (‘Tale of the Bad Girl’) had left my brains, or rather my entire constitution, screaming for I simply could not get a hang of what was actually happening. Uttara had bred high expectations from Buddhadeb Dasgupta and his style of film-making. Dasgupta’s films are predominantly anti-bourgeoisie, or in other words, inimical to capitalist values. Therefore, his films are mostly, convincingly, surrealistic. His surrealism, however, is not as hard-hitting as that of Salvador Dali or Luis Buňuel. His films are, nonetheless, pyrotechnical with images and sequences merging into each other without any apparent logic, but conveying a sense of meaning, though this meaning keeps on slipping away. Uttara is a classical example of one such film, near-about perfectly surrealistic. Therefore its successor Mondomeyer Upakhyan was looked forward to with high hopes. A terrible star-cast, a flimsy script, and unfathomable inconsistencies in the name of surrealism left the audience flummoxed. Surrealism is a mode of presentation; but if it serves as an excuse for producing a montage of images without any ‘surrealistic’ logic, the use of such a mode may be criticised as blasphemous. Mondomeyer Upakhyan exemplifies such a sacrilege. With unfavourable memories of this film lingering at the back of my mind, I entered Nandan to watch Kalpurush (‘Memories in the Mist’), Dasgupta’s twelfth release.
Kalpurush, incidentally, was made a few years ago, and was shown in many film festivals abroad, and had bagged many an award. But for some unknown reason the film was not released for the masses until last Friday, April 25th. We thought that the film would be lost, unseen. We used to have a good laugh over this, speculating that the film was canned because the distributors were too apprehensive of its fate, for Mondomeyer Upakhyan had suffered a tragic predicament at the box-office. Film distributors barely care for international awards, and refuse to release a film which isn’t cost-effective. Therefore, several good films remain shelved for years. But this time we were on the side of the distributors, not willing to see them traumatically bankrupted, for the wounds Mondomeyer Upakhyan inflicted upon us were, at least, less brutal than the injuries the poor distributors had to bear with. Surprisingly, the hard-core commercial Jhamu Sugandh, notoriously associated with mainstream Bengali cinema, came forward to release the film. With a history of remaining canned for years as one of the claims to fame, Kalpurush hit the theatres and multiplexes of Kolkata, drawing its usual niche audience, who, I am sure, went in with a lot of scepticisms. However, unlike Mondomeyer Upakhyan, the film, thankfully enough, did not leave a bitter taste, when we walked out at the drop of the curtains. Dislocated narrative, surrealistic images converging to form new images, anti-imperialist discourse — the characteristic features of a typical Dasgupta film are also the defining aspects of Kalpurush. But Kalpurush does not degenerate into another Mondomeyer Upakhyan, for it has a story to tell, complying with the basic purpose of cinema, i.e. entertainment.
Connecting, with love
The credits of the film fade-in on the night’s sky of Kolkata, divided into multiple segments by a network of overhead electric cables of tram-cars. The camera lingeringly descends and enters the inside of a moving tram-car with the protagonists Sumanto (Rahul Bose) and Ashwini (Mithun Chakraborty) seated on different chairs. The tram comes to a stop when Sumanto gets down, followed by Ashwini down the deserted lanes of his ‘para’. Ashwini begins to narrate the story — Sumanto is his son, married to Supriya (Sameera Reddy), and he has yet to tell him a lot. An element of suspense creeps in as the audience is left in doubt whether Ashwini is real or apparitional. Why is he following his son? The narrative, almost immediately, jump-cuts to a rugged village where Ashwini is seen talking to his wife Putul (Laboni Sarkar), under a leafless tree that has gathered the twilight grey. Putul asks him whether he has met Sumanto. Ashwini says, “Yes” and moves on to ask Putul about how she is keeping these days. Ashwini’s conversation with Putul is not normal: they seem to have met after a separation of a few days, or a few months. The suspense deepens as the narrative leaps back to Sumanto’s daily life.
Sumanto is a plain and honest Govt. employee married to a school teacher who is presently obsessed with her impending two-month sojourn in the United States at her brother’s. Supriya is visibly peevish, and does not have any respect for Sumanto, who, she believes, epitomizes failure. She converses with her lover over the land phone, while Sumanto is in the vicinity. It is, however, not made clear whether she is aware of Sumanto’s presence or she underestimates him so much that she does not care whether he is in-the-know or ignorant of her extra-marital liaison.
The narrative moves effortlessly from the present to the past and back and mingles images of the present and the past in such a way that the time-frames seem concomitant. Dasgupta captures mental time rather than the physical, thereby baffling the audience who seems to inhabit multiple time-zones simultaneously. This bafflement, however, is pleasurable. The subversion of the linear storyline actually attributes a sense of wholeness to the narrative. While still in doubt about the reality of Ashwini’s existence, the audience moves back and forth to develop an idea about Sumanto’s character.
If honesty defines his basic nature, a loveless world forces him into worshipping human bonds. He appears naïve, to some extent an irritable simpleton, submissive and docile. He tells Ashwini how his eyes well up with tears as he sees someone wiping the tears off the cheeks of someone else. He almost makes a fool of himself as he admiringly gazes at a couple making love in the public park. He gets on the nerves of the television newsreader (Subhashish Mukherjee) by asking him juvenile questions about the business of news reporting. He barely reacts when Supriya almost blandly tells him that he is not the father of his children. His love for the two kids does not dwindle at all. The information has no effect on his equation with them. He continues to love them as he used to. His unconventionality is his mode of rebellion. He is no laudable hero who goes out to upset the hierarchy; his very penchant for connecting with love sets him aside in an otherwise materialistic world. This aspect of his character recalls the network of electric cables with which the film opens. Shall we say that this network metaphorically signifies the importance of human bonding that the film ultimately advocates? Is that why Supriya and the prostitute merge into one?
And amidst all these, the audience is made aware that Sumanto has a guilt-ridden past that conditions his present. His past constantly catches up with him in the form of Ashwini, his father.
The Ghost of the Father: the importance of the presence of an absence
No, Kalpurush is not another Hamlet. Or in a way, is it? The world has come a long way from the glorious Elizabethan age. The dilemma of “To be or not to be” is still palpably the foundation of the fearfully existentialist world, certainly more fearful and challenging than Hamlet’s. Yet the ghosts of dead fathers do haunt their sons, not to persuade them to avenge their murderers, but to remind them of the burden of history that they need to bear. No conscious viewer can miss the influence of Jacques Derrida’s spectres of marx (note that the original title is in the lower-case) in the conceptualization of the narrative.
Ashwini is dead. His wife Putul and his son Sumanto had severed all ties with him on account of his infidelity. His supposed physical relationship with the yatra-actress Abha (Sudipta Chakraborty) leads Putul to disown him. Insulted and badly hurt, Putul confides in Sumanto, a teenager, who, in a fit of mad rage shoots Ashwini. The latter does not die, but is mildly wounded. Putul leaves the house the next day with Sumanto. Her anger subsides after a few months, and she returns to discover that Ashwini is missing. Later they come to know that he has died in an accident. What is important is that Ashwini never had any physical relationship with Abha. The allegation that Putul brings against him is based on incomplete knowledge. Sumanto’s oedipal hostility towards his father as concretized in his desperate attempt to murder him is kind of undermined by this truth. This is the burden of guilt which Sumanto carries with him. The return of the father’s ghost is therefore necessary.
Spectres from the past in form of the flute-player and his son also return along with Ashwini. The melodious tunes from a lost past fill the deserted alleys of the city as Sumanto falls asleep with his two children. The melancholy tune seems to mourn the past — such mourners are necessary, for, as Derrida believes they are inheritors of all that ensues from the past, and in their mourning they iterate a promise of responsibility for the future.
Sumanto’s penance for attempted patricide lies in his establishing a new connection with Ashwini — the day he meets him in the tram-car and talks to him, takes him to the restaurant and buys him a new shirt and a pair of trousers. Ashwini becomes his constant companion, in moments of loneliness and even when he is surrounded by people. Ashwini becomes a constant presence in his life, a shadow to which he holds on to. Putul’s recurrent encounter with Ashwini, of which she talks rather insipidly, perplexes her grandchildren. Sumanto is equally bemused and closes the window through which Ashwini supposedly calls Putul. It is not long before that he too realizes the presence of Ashwini in his life as well. Ashwini, however, does not appear in dreams: he is everywhere in the everyday life of his wife and son. The present is indeed past continuous. There are things that we need to remember, ethically. The remembrance or recollection blends the past in the present in such a way that one cannot be filtered out of the other. The figures from the past are all around us, and (as Amitav Ghosh says in The Shadow Lines) “their ghostliness is merely the absence of time and distance…a ghost is a presence displaced in time.”
America: the ‘Kusumpur’ of desire
Kusumpur is the imaginative land which Ashwini looks for all his life. Nobody knows the geographical location of this land. In fact, it is impossible to know. For, there are several Kusumpur(s) of the mind — a Utopian destination which means different things to different people. Recall that poignant scene from Uttara: a group of illiterate, underfed, haggard old men embarks on a journey by foot to America — the land where nobody starves. America is their Kusumpur — the land of overabundance, prosperity, and nourishment. The world’s imperialist centre is projected thus in the popular discourse. This highly politicized representation of America as the dreamland, the land of wish-fulfilment has entered the popular imagination in such a way that it is difficult to think ill of it. Highly positive pictures of America has been etched upon the collective unconscious of the masses, especially of the Third World (I don’t think this is an obsolete term as yet). Therefore, Supriya, a mundane school teacher almost goes berserk at the invitation of his brother to spend a couple of months in the States. She urges Sumanto to buy her every possible Bengali book available on America. The titles available, to Sumanto’s astonishment, are countless, and underscore the authors’ sycophantic reverence for the country.
While Supriya revels in the golden opportunity of flying to this dreamland, which also becomes her Kusumpur, the regional television channel airs news about America’s imperialistic designs almost nonchalantly. Only once, does the newsreader lose control and intersperse the news with unspeakable abuses, giving expression to his anger directed to “fucking” America. However, all this happens in Sumanto’s imagination. The newsreader’s outrage is actually a projection of his feelings.
However, the film too blatantly speaks against American imperialism. The anti-imperialist stance the director adopts borders on the propagandist. Films like these are expected to handle such issues with more subtlety. The presence of America in everyday life is undeniable; therefore, a protest against such hegemony has ample scope of being suggestive, rather than manifest. This is one of the primary drawbacks of Kalpurush.
The ‘Other’ as hero
In the neo-colonial world, new binaries have been constructed, both socio-political and moral. While European diffusionism had its own set of binaries stabilizing their colonial enterprise, the new world too has its own binaries, the first of the duo being the more powerful — America/the rest of the world, city/country, cinema/other forms of popular art, dishonesty/honesty, so on and so forth. The protagonist of Kalpurush is honest; he has his roots in a rugged village; and he is anti-America. That’s enough reason to look upon him as the ‘Other’. Forms of entertainment such as the yatra which are losing grounds due to the overwhelming influence of cinema, the most powerful of all modern arts, are time and again made central to Dasgupta’s films. The actors going overboard in enacting emotions, dazzling costumes, and loud make-up that define a typical yatra are also quite central to the narrative of Kalpurush. At the risk of oversimplification, it may be said that the film attempts to establish counter-hegemony of the ‘Other’. However, such an observation is subject to debate.
Some anomalies
Adoption of the surreal mode of representation gives the director the poetic license to travel effortlessly from realms of fantasy to real territories. This occasions a number of unexplained anomalies which can be explained away on painstaking analysis. But Kalpurush has certain anomalies which cannot be excused on the pretext of the surrealistic mode of presentation. For instance, Supriya, a school teacher cannot speak English, yet she teaches in an upper middle class school. The students of her class are sufficiently grown-up; yet, they are pitifully ignorant of America. It is simply ludicrous that none of them can point out America on the globe. Again, the yatra-dal starts performing in front of little Santanu all of a sudden. Why on earth would they do that? There are small slips here and there which could have been overlooked, had the director not been Buddhadeb Dasgupta!
The Actors
Both Mithun Chakraborty and Rahul Bose do justice to the roles. But unfortunately enough both of them speak a language that does not really sound like Bengali — it is marred by a Hindi accent. Rahul Bose known for his perfectionism and fastidiousness should have been more careful with his diction. Mithun who is mostly engaged in tacky projects such as Cheetah, MLA Fatakeshto, etc, has, quite naturally lost the decent “bhadrolok” accent…for, mostly he is the hero of uncouthly downmarket masses and has adopted the “tapori” accent that appeals to them! Sameera Reddy isn’t bad; Bidipta and Soma Chakraborty lend their voices to Sameera, which, however, does not add much to the performance! One ruefully recalls how marvellously Sudipta Chakraborty's voice-acting had transformed Raima Sen’s screen presence in Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali. The minor actors are average. In any case, Dasgupta, unlike Rituparno, is not an actor’s director. The theme of his films and the narrative techniques he adopts are his hero. And there, thankfully, he scores really high this time.
