The impermanence of everything

Dipankar Sarkar

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.”   — Ernest Hemingway

IN Kislay’s debut feature film Aise Hee (Just Like That), each character in the film tries to cope with his/her quiddity in his/her own way. The circumstances of the forlorn characters consume them as they ponder over their anxieties that come with their middle class existence. Their lives present us with their constant tussle as they witness transition in society. Precise compositions, contemplative pacing, static camera angle and elliptical narrative unfold one event after the other where the progression is used to evoke a sense of melancholy and poetry in everyday existence.

The young filmmaker deftly presents the internal and social battles of the characters, sometimes with humour, other times with stark reality.

Within its length of 120 minutes, the film moves with the unforced, unhurried speed of a leaf on a stream. Nothing, or almost nothing, is dramatically underlined or shoved under the audience’s nose for inspection. The film appears as a poignant record of a hidden sorrow in the modern city of Allahabad, before the city’s name has changed.

The film opens with the ritual ceremony after the death of Mrs Sharma’s husband. The gathering of relatives and the ceremonies make Mrs Sharma uncomfortable and she takes refuge inside the bathroom to distance herself from the mourners. Thereafter, she starts living on the floor above her family and treads the hitherto uncharted socially restricted territories of her life. Her nonchalant approach includes visiting shopping malls, parlours, eating ice-creams, learning embroidery from a Muslim tailor in the neighbourhood. But soon her new-found freedom stirs a hornet’s nest of social restrictions and she has to take measures to ensure her émancipation.

Likewise her son Virendra, an announcer with the All India Radio, is passing through a phase of crisis in his professional life. Her daughter-in-law Sonia seems trapped within the confines of household chores and her grandson Vinay displays his patriarchal streak over elder sister Vinni’s flamboyancies. All primary characters in the film are not mere passive victims but struggling with one hurdle or another. Their stories are played out in a world that is a living, dynamic exemplar of the truth that all flesh is grass and everything around us is impermanent and temporary.

Emotional mobility in a new direction helps Mrs Sharma to persevere even though her family inexorably distances  itself from her. It further reflects a keen sense of fragility of relationships and the impermanence of life as the city expands towards a new environment from which people cannot escape. The film, in its final moment, reflects our own experiences back onto us not solely because the ending’s emotional weight carries such an immense impact, but because we will know that we might have experienced what these characters have gone through, and didn’t know how to express it. The film grows on the viewers, subtly and over time. As with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.

The film won the Special Jury Mention at the Busan International Film Festival. At MAMI, it won the Film Critics Guild Award and a special Jury Mention as Best Female Actor award for Mohini Sharma.