Sunday, June 22, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Family, By Chance: Recreating a Single Community across Differences in Chalo-Let’s Go
Ramchandra Guha’s much celebrated book "India After Gandhi" that attempts to retell the history of the world’s largest democracy begins with extensive and insightful recapitulation of views on India by its former colonisers. Of these, Sir John Strachey’s Cambridge lectures later collected in a volume, unostentatiously titled "India", are of particular significance; for, Strachey’s prediction of the future of democracy in India has come true. Interestingly, Strachey sees India as a composition of countries, not as a single nation. No Indian nation ever existed in the past, nor would one emerge in the future. Strachey holds that “national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries”, but “they should never extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of various nations of Europe.” Again, Winston Churchill in a speech delivered in London in December 1930, declared that if the British left India, then “an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindus.” Ironically, at that time, the likes of Nehru were dreaming of a secular democratic India. That both Strachey and Churchill were absolutely correct has been proved many times over. A democracy called India has existed theoretically or constitutionally, but the reality is at variance with the idea. The recent controversy raging in the hills over the possible creation of Gorkhaland, separated from West Bengal is a case in point. Several other examples can also be cited from history: beginning with the nightmarish Partition, the Indian state has seen itself breaking up along linguistic borders, suffering in the darkness of the Emergency, and combating constantly recurring communal violence. The unspeakable violence unleashed by the Hindus on the Sikhs, following the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, the demolition of Babri Mashjid, followed by the most brutal Hindu-Muslim riots of all times, the shameful Godhra incident — all of these posed serious and almost fatal threats to the democracy. The four axes of conflict — caste, religion, class and language — operating singly and in tandem only promise a divided India, impossible to be united.
Indian popular culture, mostly cinema, has more often than not stuck to the representation of India that gives a constitutionally approved picture of the nation. While addressing the differences that exist between castes, religions, classes and linguistic groups, Indian films end in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, eradicating differences and reinstating the democratic state. The dream of a democratic nation has been, more or less, sustained in the fictional world of mainstream cinema. And to address the diversity of the country, filmmakers have often chosen the journey motif as the prime movers of their plots: the train or the bus, the modern means of transport, has more often than not provided a perfect setting for these films. The train or the bus can be easily transformed into the microcosm of the Indian nation, a site harbouring temporarily people from different walks of life. These films celebrate plurality and differences, mostly giving the impression of a possibility of uniting diverse individuals, of creating a united India.
From "Bombay to Goa" to "Chalo-Let’s Go", the same trope — a group of people meeting each other on a journey and forming an accidental family — has been used. In fact, in the last few years, this particular genre of films has flourished considerably. The most celebrated of these films is Aparna Sen’s "Mr. & Mrs. Iyer", a poignant commentary on communal violence and human bondage. Other lesser known films are "Jungle", "Honeymoon Travels", "Just Married", etc. The necessity of recreating the community is felt more intensely with increasing individualization, owing to globalization and rapid growth of urban culture. Parents are estranged from their children, spouses hardly meet, and the neighbourhood has become more alien than the land across the seas. Real communities are being speedily replaced by cyber communities; communal bonding has been redefined in terms of exchanging electronic mails or sending Archie’s Cards. Under such circumstances, films such as "Chalo-Let’s Go" appeal to everybody.
Anjan Dutta’s "Bong Connection" and "Bow Barracks Forever" had already created the grounds for "Chalo". Both these films dealt with much-debated issues of diasporic identities, the real homeland, marginalization, minority culture and stuff. Chalo is a return to the more familiar Bengali activity of “beratey jawa” (going for an outing). The film is in tune with the new venture of the Indian government of marketing “Incredible India” — the tourism project. Bengalis are, in any case, well-known for their wanderlust. With the mushrooming of travel and tourism agencies in every nook and corner of the city, this age-old wanderlust has found an easy and affordable outlet. The film revolves around such a travel agency “Ghoroa” run by four amateur and terribly inexperienced men — Ashim (Saswata), Sanjay (Parambrata), Shekhar (Ritwick) and Hari (Rudraneel). Ashim has given up on his medical profession, Sanjay has left his promising job of a journalist, and Sekhar has sworn not to see his father’s face, a well-to-do businessman of North Calcutta. Hari has no illustrious past, apart from having a long history of being ditched in love. The foursome takes a group of Bengali tourists to North Bengal — a man-watching detective novelist, a Chemistry professor all to ready to berate the Bengali ‘jati’, an NRI doctor and his wife having the bizarre ability of telling people’s future by holding their hands during special moments, a librarian with a heart of gold and his irritated and peevish wife, a middle-aged Casanova and his young arm-candy, and a lovelorn woman who accidentally becomes a part of the group. A sweet love triangle is created between this woman, Hari and Sanjay, occasioning many a humorous situation capable of drawing spontaneous laughs from the audience.
The narrative moves slowly with the inexperienced travel agents being bombarded with complaints and whinges from the tourists. In this drama of entangled lives, humour is the prime mover. The dislocated narrative moving between past, present and future has a special appeal. The camera affectionately captures the Elysium beauty of North Bengal, the natural beauty providing a contrasting backdrop to the human problems, petty and limiting.
The film strives to recreate a community, but here too democracy is sacrificed to selfish needs. Everybody fights for their rights — the right kind of room, the right kind of seat, the right kind of breakfast, etc. While some get it, others don’t. The detective points out that some of the tourists who are getting what they want in spite of the difficulties are those who are bribing the agents. The petty politics of the state seems to be repeated here. One is reminded how handsomely one has to bribe an agent for an emergency cooking gas connection, for admission in a good school, or even for a telephone connection. Perhaps, democracy has so severely suffered and proved to be such a big failure that even the fictional world can no longer afford to give an illusion that it exists. We are a long way off from the 1970s when the hopes were still alive. In the 21st century, the realization that democracy is only an ideal has become more intense and persuasive.
Bidipta Chakraborty and Kaushik Ganguly make the most interesting couple, and perhaps the most familiar of characters. Kaushik’s goodness and his unnaturally unassuming nature irritate Bidipta who never lets go a single opportunity of rebuking him. Kaushik never complains and tries in his own clumsy way to keep her happy. Open-minded and jovial, Kaushik is blissfully nonchalant to the material needs of life, much to Bidipta’s exasperation. She repents that she had unthinkingly agreed to the match as some holy man had assured her that a prince was coming into her life. She confides to Koneenica who reminds her of the frog-prince. Interestingly, look-wise too Kaushik is far from princely. And then one evening, as Kaushik sits in the mall and sings in “full-throated ease” the Tagore verse “Achhe dukkho, achhe mrityu”, Bidipta all of a sudden remembers the story of the frog-prince. She sits beside him, and asks him to hold her hand.
The intertext of the film is, as evident to any conscious viewer, is Ray’s classic Kanchenjungha. Here however, several loose ends remain. Everything is not righted in the end. The tourism business proves to be a failure. Shekhar goes back as his father dies of a massive heart attack, and later becomes a singer. Ashim renounces the material world to find his true calling in looking after the destitute at a Christian home in the hills. Hari gets married to that lovelorn woman visibly demoralising Sanjay, and lives through the wind and the rain. Sanjay is on the look for a proper break as a filmmaker. And the story that he tells as the narrator is a rough draft of the screenplay he is presently writing.
"Chalo-Let’s Go" is not a great film. But it does have the power to pull upper middle class Bengali film audience back to the theatres. More of these films should be made, so that the monsters of Bengali cinema, the likes of Swapan Saha and Haranath Chakraborty cannot push the industry towards the deeper end of perdition.
Indian popular culture, mostly cinema, has more often than not stuck to the representation of India that gives a constitutionally approved picture of the nation. While addressing the differences that exist between castes, religions, classes and linguistic groups, Indian films end in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, eradicating differences and reinstating the democratic state. The dream of a democratic nation has been, more or less, sustained in the fictional world of mainstream cinema. And to address the diversity of the country, filmmakers have often chosen the journey motif as the prime movers of their plots: the train or the bus, the modern means of transport, has more often than not provided a perfect setting for these films. The train or the bus can be easily transformed into the microcosm of the Indian nation, a site harbouring temporarily people from different walks of life. These films celebrate plurality and differences, mostly giving the impression of a possibility of uniting diverse individuals, of creating a united India.
From "Bombay to Goa" to "Chalo-Let’s Go", the same trope — a group of people meeting each other on a journey and forming an accidental family — has been used. In fact, in the last few years, this particular genre of films has flourished considerably. The most celebrated of these films is Aparna Sen’s "Mr. & Mrs. Iyer", a poignant commentary on communal violence and human bondage. Other lesser known films are "Jungle", "Honeymoon Travels", "Just Married", etc. The necessity of recreating the community is felt more intensely with increasing individualization, owing to globalization and rapid growth of urban culture. Parents are estranged from their children, spouses hardly meet, and the neighbourhood has become more alien than the land across the seas. Real communities are being speedily replaced by cyber communities; communal bonding has been redefined in terms of exchanging electronic mails or sending Archie’s Cards. Under such circumstances, films such as "Chalo-Let’s Go" appeal to everybody.
Anjan Dutta’s "Bong Connection" and "Bow Barracks Forever" had already created the grounds for "Chalo". Both these films dealt with much-debated issues of diasporic identities, the real homeland, marginalization, minority culture and stuff. Chalo is a return to the more familiar Bengali activity of “beratey jawa” (going for an outing). The film is in tune with the new venture of the Indian government of marketing “Incredible India” — the tourism project. Bengalis are, in any case, well-known for their wanderlust. With the mushrooming of travel and tourism agencies in every nook and corner of the city, this age-old wanderlust has found an easy and affordable outlet. The film revolves around such a travel agency “Ghoroa” run by four amateur and terribly inexperienced men — Ashim (Saswata), Sanjay (Parambrata), Shekhar (Ritwick) and Hari (Rudraneel). Ashim has given up on his medical profession, Sanjay has left his promising job of a journalist, and Sekhar has sworn not to see his father’s face, a well-to-do businessman of North Calcutta. Hari has no illustrious past, apart from having a long history of being ditched in love. The foursome takes a group of Bengali tourists to North Bengal — a man-watching detective novelist, a Chemistry professor all to ready to berate the Bengali ‘jati’, an NRI doctor and his wife having the bizarre ability of telling people’s future by holding their hands during special moments, a librarian with a heart of gold and his irritated and peevish wife, a middle-aged Casanova and his young arm-candy, and a lovelorn woman who accidentally becomes a part of the group. A sweet love triangle is created between this woman, Hari and Sanjay, occasioning many a humorous situation capable of drawing spontaneous laughs from the audience.
The narrative moves slowly with the inexperienced travel agents being bombarded with complaints and whinges from the tourists. In this drama of entangled lives, humour is the prime mover. The dislocated narrative moving between past, present and future has a special appeal. The camera affectionately captures the Elysium beauty of North Bengal, the natural beauty providing a contrasting backdrop to the human problems, petty and limiting.
The film strives to recreate a community, but here too democracy is sacrificed to selfish needs. Everybody fights for their rights — the right kind of room, the right kind of seat, the right kind of breakfast, etc. While some get it, others don’t. The detective points out that some of the tourists who are getting what they want in spite of the difficulties are those who are bribing the agents. The petty politics of the state seems to be repeated here. One is reminded how handsomely one has to bribe an agent for an emergency cooking gas connection, for admission in a good school, or even for a telephone connection. Perhaps, democracy has so severely suffered and proved to be such a big failure that even the fictional world can no longer afford to give an illusion that it exists. We are a long way off from the 1970s when the hopes were still alive. In the 21st century, the realization that democracy is only an ideal has become more intense and persuasive.
Bidipta Chakraborty and Kaushik Ganguly make the most interesting couple, and perhaps the most familiar of characters. Kaushik’s goodness and his unnaturally unassuming nature irritate Bidipta who never lets go a single opportunity of rebuking him. Kaushik never complains and tries in his own clumsy way to keep her happy. Open-minded and jovial, Kaushik is blissfully nonchalant to the material needs of life, much to Bidipta’s exasperation. She repents that she had unthinkingly agreed to the match as some holy man had assured her that a prince was coming into her life. She confides to Koneenica who reminds her of the frog-prince. Interestingly, look-wise too Kaushik is far from princely. And then one evening, as Kaushik sits in the mall and sings in “full-throated ease” the Tagore verse “Achhe dukkho, achhe mrityu”, Bidipta all of a sudden remembers the story of the frog-prince. She sits beside him, and asks him to hold her hand.
The intertext of the film is, as evident to any conscious viewer, is Ray’s classic Kanchenjungha. Here however, several loose ends remain. Everything is not righted in the end. The tourism business proves to be a failure. Shekhar goes back as his father dies of a massive heart attack, and later becomes a singer. Ashim renounces the material world to find his true calling in looking after the destitute at a Christian home in the hills. Hari gets married to that lovelorn woman visibly demoralising Sanjay, and lives through the wind and the rain. Sanjay is on the look for a proper break as a filmmaker. And the story that he tells as the narrator is a rough draft of the screenplay he is presently writing.
"Chalo-Let’s Go" is not a great film. But it does have the power to pull upper middle class Bengali film audience back to the theatres. More of these films should be made, so that the monsters of Bengali cinema, the likes of Swapan Saha and Haranath Chakraborty cannot push the industry towards the deeper end of perdition.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Humane Images of Human Emotions: How Rituparno Ghosh Tells Our Tales
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)