An ode to memory

Shoma A. Chatterji

Jahnu Barua is one of the most outstanding filmmakers from Assam. His new short film That Gusty Morning was part of MIFF 2018 this year. This film reminds one of his earlier Hindi film Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, starring Anupam Kher in the main role of retired professor of Hindi who is slowly sinking into dementia. How his loving daughter brings him out of this dementia and rids him of past ghosts that haunt him is what the film is all about.

That Gusty Morning is a very short film that emphasises on family ties in today’s materialistic world. Like all his films, this film too, has a very subtle and low-key message that emerges not only from the storyline, but also, and more importantly, from the entire cinematic paraphernalia of acting, cinematography, sound design, art direction, dialogue and the rest. The way Barua takes his audience on a journey through a small family and involves it in the problems of the family is like magic in cinema without any dramatics at all. 

In That Gusty Morning, he introduces us to a nuclear family comprised of a middle-aged husband (Arun Nath), his wife (Seema Biswas) who was a college teacher and their 27-year-old daughter Juree (Urmila Mahanta). The family is facing problems fixing her marriage because the mother is in varied stages of Alzheimer’s and keeps losing her memory every now and then. Juree’s parents have taken premature retirement because of the mother’s illness. One marriage alliance has already broken. The father and daughter are sceptical about how the next alliance will turn up. The film ends on a note of hope and optimism with the acceptance of the situation by another young man. The sound design is beautiful and so is the very subtle music. But it is the acting that takes the film up the ladder of cinematic excellence.

Jahnu says, “My interest in Alzheimer’s is rooted in an old memory from my childhood. I must have been about eight at the time and along with my friends, we would laugh at an old man in our village we all felt was a madman because he would forget everything including his name. Many years later, I understood that he was not mad at all but was a patient of either dementia or Alzheimer’s and That Gusty Morning is an ode to his memory.” The film features Seema Biswas in the role of the mother who is losing her memory and like all Barua’s films that are richly inlaid with emotions in different hues. This film is no exception. 

“You cannot define a situation on screen until you know how to present them with emotions. As a filmmaker I have never shied away from emotions. If there is love or hatred, I have believed in showcasing the intensity of that love or hatred on screen. This portrayal of emotions makes one movie different from the other,” he sums up. That Gusty Morning has been uploaded on the Large Short Films YouTube channel.

A very low profile person, rare in the film world, Barua does not wear his 12 National and international awards or his Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan titles on his sleeve. He allows his films to do all the talking. They do, and how! For those who do not know him, it would be difficult to associate this man with such wonderful films like It’s a Long Way to the Sea, or, The Catastrophe, or, Papori and Silence and many more. His film Baandhon (2013) became the first Assamese film to release outside the state.