(This column
was published on April 22, 2017, before the release of Posto. The film is in
theatres this week)
A LAMENT FOR BANGLAWOOD
The industry that once gave us Arati
from Ray’s Mahanagar is gearing up for a new work from the makers of the
conformist, misogynistic money-spinners Belaseshe and Praktan
By
Anna MM Vetticad
Their last film featured a
heroine tearily regretting her failure to “compromise”, that led to the end of
her marriage with a selfish, deeply patriarchal, jealous, egoistic man. Nothing
succeeds like misogyny, as directors Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukherjee
discovered on the release of Praktan (Former), which starred
Rituparna Sengupta as that ex-wife bemoaning her self-respect. The film was
2016’s biggest Bengali hit, following in the footsteps of Roy and Mukherjee’s
equally prejudiced Belaseshe (At The End of the Day) that drew
crowds in 2015.
After two consecutive
money-spinners, release plans for the duo’s latest, Posto, have just
been announced. It will arrive in theatres in May, riding the wave of Belaseshe
and Praktan’s unprecedented box-office triumph that has made Roy and
Mukherjee the toast of Banglawood and Posto a tent-pole project.
According to Eros International,
worldwide distributors of the three, Praktan is the first Bengali film
that released globally on the same day as in Kolkata; both Belaseshe and
Praktan lasted 100 days in halls; Praktan was released in 101
theatres in Kolkata and over 25 elsewhere across India. Eros has increased that
all-India number to about 100 for Posto, “a first for any Bengali film,”
we are told.
While Posto is an unknown
quantity, Belaseshe and Praktan’s success should be cause for
soul-searching among liberal cinephiles. How does one come to terms with the
sad realisation that the social backwardness of these two films is being
celebrated by an industry once known globally through Satyajit Ray and an
audience that once toasted this great man whose feminism was an intrinsic part
of his cinematic genius? That large sections of the public and press are
unfazed if not outrightly impressed by the shocking conservatism? One of the
rare voices in the media raised against Praktan last year was Debapriya
Nandi who wrote in this publication: “The reason why a film like Praktan is
detrimental to the discourse around female characters is very simple: it
panders to the basest, most crudely primitive assumptions made about women. It
takes a strong, positive female character and then outright assassinates her.” The
Telegraph invited responses to the question: “Is the message of Praktan regressive
for women?”
Most coverage, however, did not
even mention Belaseshe and Praktan’s extreme misogyny. One review
went to the extent of applauding Roy and Mukherjee for their “progressive themes
and fresh ideas”. Seriously?
In Belaseshe, an old man decides to divorce
his wife of almost 50 years because their relationship has been reduced to a
“habit”. The starting point of the film suggests that it would give us a
refreshing take on the boredom that sets into marriages. Instead Belaseshe goes down a safe path from
there, glorifying the traditional Indian wife’s role as housekeeper and maid,
and endorsing socially pre-determined roles for man and woman within the
institution. The elderly wife at one point reveals that she used to eat her
husband’s leftovers after he was through with his meals and she would re-use
his wet towels after he had bathed, since they smelled of him. In the end, the
old man returns to her because he misses the perennial presence of that person who
would clear up his messes and always knew where to find his shoes. Apparently,
true husbandly love is about acknowledging that your wife is an excellent
housemaid.
Praktan is even more cringeworthy. At
least Arati from Belaseshe wants nothing more than to be the home bird
her husband seeks in her. Praktan’s Sudipa though has ambitions outside
marriage for which she is ultimately reviled. I say “ultimately” because the
film is sneaky with its agenda. At first it fakes empathy for Sudipa as her
husband Ujaan taunts her for earning more than he does, accuses her of having
an office affair and demands that she ask his “permission” before making travel
plans. In short, Praktan does not gloss over his mean, ill-tempered,
bitter, resentful, unpleasant behaviour. However, as the film progresses, you
realise it does not unequivocally condemn Ujaan but is of the view that it was
Sudipa’s duty to accommodate his ego.
Much of Praktan is spent
on a train in which Sudipa’s co-passenger, coincidentally, is Ujaan’s
second wife Molly. Sudipa is a conservation architect. Molly is a housewife.
The contrast between them is used, in the end, to project Sudipa as a failure
and laud Molly’s malleability: Molly speaks with child-like satisfaction of the
compromises she made to win over her husband and in-laws, and a sorrowful
Sudipa in the finale tells Molly that she has learnt a lot from her, she has
learnt now that the result of “adjustment” and “compromise” is, in a sense,
victory.
I wonder how Arati from Ray’s Mahanagar
(1963) would have reacted to that as she strode towards a future partnered
by a well-meaning but insecure husband compelled to come to terms with his
wife’s new-found sense of self. The tragedy of Belaseshe and Praktan is
not that they were made, but that we have rewarded Roy and Mukherjee for their
regressiveness. Think about that as their PR campaign goes into overdrive
before the release of Posto.
(This article
was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on April 22, 2017.)
Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:
Previous instalment of Film Fatale: There are no “Hindu actors”
and “Muslim actors”, please!
Photographs courtesy:
