Film Appreciation:

A sophisticated Bangla film

K S Sivakumaran

During the Tagore Film Festival (from September 1 to 5) held in Colombo (Courtesy the Indian High Commission) five remarkable films were shown. They were all classics in India cinema made in the Bengali language with subtitles in English. Five feature films and one documentary were shown. Four of the films were directed by the Master film-maker Satyajit Ray. The other was by a sophisticated director of recent vintage, Rituparno Ghosh. The films were all adapted from the stories of the great Indian intellectual of the 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore, a multifaceted artiste. A documentary on him made by Satyajit Ray was also shown.

A scene from Chokher Bali

This columnist has seen all the four films of Ray several times over during the past five decades. But it was the first time that he saw Rituparno Ghosh’s film Chokher Bali, also based on one of Tagore’s humanistic stories. So he wishes to talk about this film here. He has previously seen one of Rituparno’s films at the IFFI.

So before we do that, readers might be interested to know the names of some of the outstanding Bengali film-makers. Some film buffs might have seen a few of these film-makers’ creations in Lanka itself. The notable film-makers who have made international debut are Rai, Ritwick Ghatak, Mirnal Sen, Tapan Sinha, Buddhadeb DasGupta, Gautam Gosh, Aparna Sen, Utpalendra Chakkarabarthi, Rituparno Gosh, Sandip Rai and Raja Sen.

Usually this columnist does not like to retell the story of a film or book, but in this instance he takes an exception in reproducing what an Indian critic has seen the scenario in the film for better elucidation.

Here it goes:

“The book, Binodini (by Rabindranath Tagore), is the story of a young woman, who is left to her own devices when her sickly husband dies soon after they are married. She returns to her village and lives there for a couple of months until she sees one of her relations passing by there on her way to somewhere else.

Binodini hails the woman and the two soon agree that it would be best if Binodini came to live with the woman and her son, Mahendra (who, by the way, was one of the first to see Binodini’s photo when she was unwed and up for grabs yet refused her on account of his being “unready for marriage”). Now, when the two arrive the woman’s son and his new bride are in the throes of passion, constantly sneaking off to be alone together; this infatuation does not last long, however, when Mahendra begins to see that his wife’s friend, Binodini, is more his type.

The story details the lives of these three and Mahendra’s best friend as they deal with certain issues as distrust, adultery, lies, and numerous fallings-out between them. The movie correctly depicts what Tagore so skillfully wrote and is a sad, stirring, tale of the deceit and sorrow that come from being unsatisfied and unhappy. Written by gavin ([email protected]).

My comment here is both on the film’s aesthetics and the progressive ideas on sexuality by Tagore himself. Tagore’s nationalism, his empathy for the widows, his satirical and ironic comments on outmoded beliefs and customs during the British India, and his damnation of superstitions as well as upholding the fundamental values of the east re all embodied in a nearly three-hour filmic version.

If Cinema is a director’s art here is a director who could handle an early period piece with meticulous contemporaneous presentation thus capturing different moods and artistic portrayal of characters. I liked very much the playing by the four actors for their respective expressions. In spite of her beautiful countenance Aishwarya Rai did understand her role and gave a sustained sensitive performance as an adulteress. The main players besides the Miss World were Raima Sen, who is also beautiful to my eyes, Presentjit Chatterjee, Tota Roy Chowdrey and Lily Chakravarthi were restrained performers without any dramatic sentimentality.

The naïve and playful eroticism between Sen and Chatterjee and the lustful sequences in which Aishwarya Ray excels are beautifully pictured as poetic sequences in the film. The cinematography, the music and the colour and costumes all, take us to an India that was struggling between feudalism and modernity in age of the surging India nationalism against Lord Curzon’s rule.

The minimal but effective dialogue and the moving images enthralled me besides the overall artistic quality of the film.

While some outstanding films had been made in Hindi, Marati, Asaamese, Oriya, Gujerati, Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil, the Bengali films outshine all the rest partly due to the strong cultural milieu that Bengal has developed for centuries.

The Indian High Commission should help us see more and more regional films of India.

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