Inner chambers of the mind

Saibal Chatterjee

Rarely has Bengali cinema been in a bigger trough. In order to reclaim lost ground, it is in desperate need of new voices and innovative approaches. Adventure yarns, detective thrillers, regressive family dramas and lowbrow comedies seem to be the principal genres in vogue. Amazon Obhijaan (Amazon Expedition), released on December 22, has just become the highest-grossing Bengali film of all time. Why, then, is cinema in the land of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak gasping for air? Genuine creative inspiration has run dry.

But all might not be lost. Three offbeat films — one of which has miraculously held its own at the boxoffice — point to what contemporary Bengali cinema is sorely missing — stories rooted in here and now but narrated in artistically adventurous ways. While these three films deal with the themes of mortality and the fading of memory, these have raised hopes of a mini-revival of the truly ‘cinematic’. By moving away from plot-driven storytelling conventions, these works explore the possibilities of the medium in much deeper ways than usual. Atanu Ghosh’s Mayurakshi, Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Jonaki and Indrasis Acharya’s Pupa are essentially relationship dramas that employ individualistic methods to depict the dynamics of human emotions and memories. These provide evidence that cinema of true artistic value, cinema that does not merely chase commercial returns, is not entirely dead in Bengal.

“It is difficult to find exhibition outlets for such films,” says Ghosh, whose sixth feature Mayurakshi, starring Soumitra Chatterjee and Prosenjit Chatterjee, has bucked the trend. The film hit the screens a week after the release of the Bollywood spy thriller Tiger Zinda Hai and Amazon Obhijaan, and yet managed to sustain itself in the multiplexes. 

“The response to Mayurakshi was completely unexpected,” says the director for whom the film marks a pronounced break from the past in terms of form and concept.

Mayurakshi has struck a chord with the audiences because it deals with an everyday theme in a quietly immersive style, which, in turn, is appreciably bolstered by two fabulous lead performances. It tells the story of a successful middle-aged techie (Prosenjit) who travels back to Kolkata at a short notice to be by the side of his ailing octogenarian father (Soumitra), a retired history professor who is slowly slipping into dementia. 

Over the five days that he is in the city, the busy US-based professional, nursing the after-effects of two failed marriages, reconnects not only with the old man even as the latter’s memory fails him, but also  himself.

Pupa, which recently fetched Indrasis Acharya the Best Director award at the 5th Aurangabad International Film Festival, addresses a similar theme but in a manner that is markedly different. The film, Acharya’s second, is about family ties placed under severe strain by unforeseen circumstances.

A young teleportation researcher, played by Rahul Banerjee with impressive restraint, returns home from the US for the last rites of his deceased mother. As he prepares to leave, his father, shaken by the demise of his wife, suffers a paralytic attack. The protagonist is compelled to postpone his trip back to his workplace.

Acharya, a self-proclaimed fan of Austrian director Michael Haneke, uses minimalist means, including a strikingly sparse soundscape, to set up his drama: it hinges on two worldviews — one represented by the son of the man lying in coma, the other by his globe-trotting academic uncle who exhorts him to free himself from his filial encumbrances and think of his own life and goals.

Jonaki, an uncompromisingly experimental film that falls back on a uniquely pensive and painterly style to probe the inner recesses of the mind of a woman on her deathbed, is magnificently evocative hypnotic. The film is inspired, in part, by Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s recollections of his own grandmother who lay comatose for four days before she passed away. Overlaid with liberal doses of the imaginary, the film journeys into fading memory of a woman trapped in a motionless, unblinking state.

Jonaki, which had its world premiere at the 47th International Film Festival of Rotterdam, is a meditative film replete with surreal sequences as an 80-year-old woman floats through a mysterious world that takes us back to the past, her one-time lover, now a wizened old man, returns to the same canvas in search of what he has lost.

Sengupta’s debut film, Labour of Love, too, found takers on the international festival circuit after premiering at the 2014 Venice Film Festival, where it won the best debut director prize of the Venice Days section. Jonaki, thanks to its stunning visual design, superb cinematography and austere structure, is a worthy follow-up.

Beyond the safe and narrow strategies that are favoured by the more commercially oriented cinema of Bengal, the likes of Jonaki — the word means firefly — have the power to dispel the darkness induced by assembly-line filmmaking.