REVIEW 363: CHAURANGA

Release date:	January 8, 2016
Director:	Bikas Ranjan Mishra
Cast: Language:	Soham Maitra, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sanjay Suri, Riddhi Sen, Ena Saha, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Swatilekha Sengupta, Arpita Pal Chatterjee, Anshuman Jha Khortha (a dialect of Maithili)

There’s understated and then there’s virtually unstated.

Writer-director Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Chauranga is so low-key that it comes across as an unfeeling drama even though the screen is, at all times, busy with multiple pressing concerns.

This film’s lack of emotional pull is inexplicable at one level because the story covers issues that would tug at the heart of any individual with an iota of conscience and sensitivity. In a village in north India lives a little Dalit boy called Santu (Soham Maitra) who longs for an education. His elder brother Bajrangi (Riddhi Sen) is studying at a boarding school in the city. Santu, on the other hand, spends his days  gazing down from a treetop at a pretty girl (Ena Saha) passing by on her two-wheeler, on her way from school to home.

Santu is unmindful of the dangers of his crush on an upper-caste girl. Meanwhile, his mother Dhaniya (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is having a clandestine affair with the girl’s father, the local strongman Dhaval (Sanjay Suri).

Also in this potent mix written by Bikas are Dhaval’s hapless wife Nidhi (Arpita Pal Chatterjee), his clueless mother (Swatilekha Sengupta) and a creepy priest (Dhritiman Chatterjee) with a sexual penchant for little girls and beasts. The plot is crying out to be felt. The fact that it fails to move has to be attributed to Bikas’ direction and the central casting.

It is one thing to portray the casualness with which caste is practised, lived and accepted in this setting, but quite another to not flinch while doing so. When a couple of high-caste boys coolly throw a Dalit kid into a well to punish him for straying into a temple, it should have been a chilling moment. A man’s hand over a woman’s mouth while they have sex in a haystack, to prevent her orgasmic moans from reaching the world, is a brilliant metaphor for the gagging of women and Dalits. Yet, in both instances, the actors involved are expressionless to the point of being unnaturally so. It is as if the director instructed them to freeze their faces to convey depth.

There appears to be no other explanation for these performances because, for instance, we know that when he is at his best, Sanjay has the ability to pull at the heartstrings in a way that few others can. This, after all, is the man who played Nikhil in the pathbreaking, soul-stirring, soul-searching 2005 Hindi film My Brother Nikhil directed by Onir, his co-producer on Chauranga.

The casting of the female protagonist though is the film’s biggest mistake. Tannishtha may well be a regular on the festival circuit but the harsh truth is that she does not have a strong screen presence and there has been a tiring sameness to her performances in all her recent films. She has had the good fortune of bagging a string of strong roles in her career, but her idea of what some people might call minimalist acting is boring beyond a point. The last time I remember being genuinely moved by her on screen was over a decade back in Florian Gallenberger’s Bengali language German production Shadows of Time, and then too, now that I look back, I realise it was the powerful story and tragic role that got to me, not her performance.

In the case of Chauranga, the director also needs to explain why he has taken the trouble to cast the heroine of one of Satyajit Ray’s best-remembered films – Swatilekha Sengupta from Ghare Baire (1984) – and then squandered her away. For most of Chauranga, the veteran’s face remains in the shadows, and I found myself squinting at the screen to be sure that it was indeed her I was seeing and not someone who looks like her.

The only member of the cast who ekes some poignancy out of this lifeless film is Arpita as the suffering wife. As for the children, Riddhi as the older brother has evident potential, but who is to say for sure that the leading little man Soham does not? If the energy that the director achieves on screen in the last five minutes had permeated Chauranga in its entirety, perhaps the boy would have delivered something more than his sweet face.

At the end of the film, I found myself dying to know how Onir would have directed this film with a slightly tweaked cast. This is, after all, a story that desperately needs to be told. It just needs to be told better.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	86 minutes

This review has also been published on firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/chauranga-review-a-low-key-film-that-tells-a-story-that-needs-to-be-told-but-doesnt-tell-it-well-enough-2576338.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauranga

REVIEW 337: BELASESHE

Release date:	June 26, 2015
Director:	Nandita Roy, Shiboprosad Mukherjee
Cast: Language:	Soumitra Chatterjee, Swatilekha Sengupta, Shankar Chakraborty, Indrani Dutta, Aparajita Auddy, Kharaj Mukherjee, Rituparna Sengupta, Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee, Indrajit Chakraborty, Monami Ghosh, Anindya Chatterjee Bengali

SPOILERS AHEAD:

There is a warmth that envelops the heart of a certain kind of film buff when a veteran actor walks on to the screen. I confess I am that kind – emotional to the point of being schmaltzy. But even the pleasure of seeing the legendary Soumitra Chatterjee – reunited here with Swatilekha Sengupta, heroine of Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire – is insufficient compensation for Belaseshe’s painfully traditionalist view of marriage and almost laughable endorsement of socially dictated pre-designated gender roles within the institution.

Tagore’s The Home And The World on which Ghare Baire was based, gave us a husband who wanted his wife to have a life beyond the home. At one point, it seems that Biswanath Majumdar (Soumitra’s character in Belaseshe) shares that mindset. But Tagore and Ray were not faking liberalism; Belaseshe is. And so, in the end, Biswanath explains that he has come to realise a wife’s role in a marriage is inside the house and the husband’s role is outside.

What a disappointing, conventional conclusion from a film that starts out asking tough questions!

Soumitra here plays an old man who shocks his family by announcing that he wants a divorce from his wife of almost 50 years. Biswanath does not hate Arati (Swatilekha). He simply believes they have become a habit with each other in a loveless marriage that is not worth preserving. When she recounts the pleasant times they’ve had together, he tells her he thinks she loves domestic life rather than him. In a nation that deifies marriage and motherhood, how often do you see a mainstream film with the courage to articulate such thoughts?

Biswanath even alludes to his sexual needs and her disinterest. How often do you hear an old couple discuss such matters in an Indian film?

While hers is a relatively tepid character, she too raises a valid point when, in response to his complaint that she was not available for romance in their younger days, she asks him how she could have possibly spared the time when she was looking after his ailing dad.

These are all issues worth addressing. Is raising a family the sole purpose of marriage? Or should companionship be the primary goal? Is procreation the only purpose of sex? Is sex to be treated as dispensable in a marriage once you’ve had the number of children you want?

Biswanath’s decision to divorce Arati and the impact on their children could have led to a deep, much-needed exploration of the pluses and minuses of marriage along with these crucial questions. What we get after the initial promise though, are cliches, conformism, a cringe-worthy romanticisation of wifely slavishness and a transparent effort to trivialise modernity.

In a scene clearly intended to be highly romantic, Arati seeks to illustrate her love for Biswanath by revealing that she used to pick up the wet towels he would leave around after bathing and re-use them herself, to imbibe the smell of him; she would also eat his leftovers after each meal.

If you are moved by her revelation, forgive me for saying this… Ugh.

Before you present a counter argument, let me pre-empt it: I have no doubt relationships like Biswanath and Arati’s do exist. The issue is that the film pretends at the start to be questioning such marriages, then goes down the same old beaten track of glorifying them.

No effort is spared to please conservatives who are opposed to a dissection of marriage, who deny the intrinsically patriarchal nature of the institution, who believe every marriage is worth preserving at all costs, and who see procreation and child-rearing as the noblest of all causes, to be ranked way above friendship in a marriage, companionship, sexual pleasure and happiness.

Director duo Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukherjee’s Belaseshe is not the liberal film it projects itself as being. Nowhere is this clearer than with the difference in its treatment of male and female infidelity. Biswanath and Arati’s son Barin (Shankar Chakraborty) and daughter Mili (Rituparna Sengupta) are both having extra-marital affairs, yet the film makes only brief references to Barin’s indiscretion and ultimate penitence, whereas it dwells at length on Mili’s unfaithfulness and later gives us elongated scenes of her remorse.

In the end, Biswanath does precisely what he claimed he was against at first. He said he was anti a marriage being nothing more than a habit you’re afraid to break; yet when he returns to Arati it is because he misses the presence of the person who would pick up his dirty clothes after him and always knew where his shoes were. Just as he wanted, she has become independent in his absence. He, however, is too dependent on her for his daily needs. Is that what makes a marriage worth holding on to? Why not hire an efficient maid instead of getting a wife? Biswanath seems to have forgotten by then that he had himself earlier made this point to the dutiful Arati.

There is also a clever attempt to deify tradition as symbolised by the old couple, while making light of modernity, personified by their youngest daughter Piu (Monami Ghosh) and her husband Palash (Anindya Chatterjee). The effort to lend gravitas to Biswanath and Arati while comedifying Piu and Palash is unmistakable. The youngsters are both TV producers. Their milieu is treated with the same disdainful attitude that makes the elderly in the real world routinely say, “Aajkal ke bachchon ka kya kehna?” (What is one to say of today’s generation?) Palash comes across as a buffoon. And from Piu’s tongue emerges such trite lines as this one: We are constantly social networking but there is no networking in this room. 

The cast is a mixed bag. Soumitra’s sensitive face is always a joy to watch and despite the faux liberalism of Belaseshe, it is hard not to be drawn to his Biswanath. Swatilekha has her moments but for the most part is deadpan. Of their children and children’s spouses, the most convincing performances come from Shankar as Barin, Indrani Dutta playing his wife, Rituparna as Mili and Indrajit Chakraborty making a brief appearance as her boyfriend. Aparajita Auddy, Kharaj Mukherjee, Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee and Anindya caricature their characters, which is a factor as much of the faulty writing as of their acting. Monami and the grandchildren fare better.

This is a theme that called for greater honesty of purpose and delicacy in approach. What we get instead is a please-all balancing act, verbosity and literalness. Despite the presence of Soumitra-da and the promising premise, Belaseshe is an unremarkable film.

Rating (out of five): **

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	141 minutes

Photograph courtesy: Eros International