Beautiful act out of real life
Shoma A. Chatterji
If you jog your memory a bit and take a time route back to April 2011, you might recall the ‘stranger-than-fiction’ incident of two sisters being rescued from their home in Noida after having locked themselves up for months together after being in deep depression following the death of their father.
“Both sisters were starving and dehydrated. They were lying on a bed and a stench came from the flat when the police broke open the door. They were so weak that we had to bring a stretcher to rush them to the hospital in an ambulance,” said Anant Dev, Superintendent of Police.
Three years later, Sohini Dasgupta decided to make a film based on this incident. She, however, took the film to a surrealistic level where the film became a tribute to Nature on the one hand and a celebration of newly discovered space for the two women on the other.
“I read about the incident in the newspaper, saw pictures and was deeply affected. This self-isolation haunted me for two years. Why did they shut themselves to the world outside? How did they survive? How come no one bothered to notice their disappearance? These questions were disturbing,” says Sohini, who made her debut with a short documentary I Could Not Be Your Son, Mom that dealt with the real-life struggle of a young man, who was determined to become a woman.
Sohini began to build a narrative on the basis of the questions. “The real-life elements such as self-starvation or anorexia nervosa were not on my mind. My mind dwelt on the conflict of the inner and outer space and the freedom each one offered or did not offer to these women. I kept the conflict at a suggestive level and allowed my imaginary and creative powers to take over,” Sohini elaborates.
Two sisters, Rita and Chhobi, single, shut themselves in their apartment after their father’s death. The only third person is their pet dog Lucy. But Lucy also dies and a series of misadventures follow these two deaths. This leads to the two women shutting themselves up within the four walls of their home. It is a different home where one of the walls develops a crack and a sapling begins to grow within the crack, grows into a tree with branches and spreads across the apartment. Birds come and sit on the branches and this turns into a different kind of world and space for Rita and Chhobi portrayed by Ananya Chatterjee, a National award-winning actress and Tannishtha Chatterjee, who also has won awards for her acting. Kulbhushan Kharbanda plays the father of the two women.
There is another character named Bunty, a young boy in the neighbourhood, who constantly teases the two women making their lives miserable. But he is also the only one who notices that they have suddenly become invisible while the rest of the world is just not bothered. He tries to poke them, make them angry like earlier but fails. His innovative attempts to make the sisters react continues, now without his friends’ support till the end. So ironically, Bunty becomes the only bridge for the two women to the outside world.
“The shell in which the sisters shut themselves slowly becomes a new space, enchanting and dynamic. Their life begins to open up and the limited, defined space of the two-bedroom flat is transformed into an unbounded, ever-changing world with many a story emanating from it. Rita and Chhoti, for the first time, talk about things they have consciously avoided before. The shell in which the sisters shut themselves up slowly becomes a new space, enchanting and dynamic,” Sohini elaborates.
Sohini has enriched the film with generous doses of fantasy and surrealism, presenting a real-life tragedy as a different journey into inner spaces of life, so different from the lives the two sisters led when their father was alive. They wrap themselves in Nature — the tree, its branches, the flowers blooming in it and birds flying in to sit on the branches, savouring the beauty of Nature for the first time in their lives.
Chhoti Moti Baatein, the only Indian film in the competitive section of the 20th Kolkata International Film Festival, is in a linear narrative. The treatment changes once the sisters finally shut themselves down. Slowly, elements of surrealism creep in. Sohini Dasgupta is overwhelmed by the reality of having two men, Dilip Chowdhury and Manoj Agarwal of Ganpati Entertainment, who agreed to produce her film. “They liked my concept, probably understood that I am not there to sell them a project with a bundle of lies but truly want to make a good cinema and finally produced my film,” she sums up.
