Abohoman

"What is a film all about?" asks the celebrated director to his son. "Moments" replies his son, an aspiring director himself. "Moments". Whispers the father. "We catch fleeting moments together, and call them "capture". Not fair, not fair"

And that statement defines Abohoman, in my opinion the best made Bengali movie of the last decade.

What makes Abohoman worthy of this praise? Great direction, great editing, superlative performances from Dipankar Dey, Ananya Chatterjee and Tanusree Sankar. But essentially, it is a caravan of moments - and cinematic magic - that the viewer immerses in. At the end of the movie, as the experience sinks in, he is left speechless.

Aniket Majumadar (Dipankar Dey) is a celebrated Bengali art film director. His dream project is to make a biopic on Nati Binodini, the celebrated Bengali stage actress of the 19th century and her relationship with her mentor - Natyasamrat Girish Chandra Ghosh. Aniket's wife Dipti (Mamata Shankar) discovers raw talent in a small-time stage actress called Shikha Sarkar (Ananya Chatterjee) and asks her husband to consider her for the title role. Initially Aniket hates Shikha's unsophistication. But Dipti's insistence, and her grooming of Shikha to meet Aniket's expectations, ultimately wins over. Soon, Aniket starts loving Shikha's spontaneity. As he transforms her into a sophisticated actress (now called Srimati Sarkar), he gets more and more involved with her. His evenings are spent in her North Kolkata residence, and his family dinners interrupted by her phone calls. It causes much distress to his wife, who cannot take the fact that her own protégé is now her husband's beloved. Aniket's son Apratim (Jishu Sengupta) is distressed at his mother's plight. He writes an article in a Bengali film journal elaborating his father's affair and how it has affected their family life. Later, Aniket falls severely sick and goes to Kurseong for a weather change, accompanied by his son, who is now a one film old director himself. Father and son share many an aspect of life - personal and professional. On coming back, Aniket passes away. Apratim decides to make a movie about his father.

The storytelling of Abohoman is wonderful. It starts off from the end, where Aniket has passed away and his house is visited by many important people. The entire movie goes into flashback mode from herein. It is a multi-layered tale, as scenes of the present share screen with scenes of the past, intermingled by scenes from Aniket's Binodini. Superb editing holds the narrative together as the different facets of the characters are unveiled.

Ananya Chatterjee effectively plays 3 roles - the raw unsophisticated Shikha Sarkar, the dignified actress Srimati, and her characterization of Nati Binodini. She embodies the tragic puppet and her complex relationship with her mentor - first through being Binodini, then Srimati. To her credit, every role is played the way it should be. She deserves every bit of the National Award she got for this movie.

I felt sorry for Dipankar Dey's character. As the talented director immersed in his work, it is really Aniket's cloak of sophistication that hides his personal feelings. He is aware that his affair has distanced himself from Apratim. His son writes a magazine story about his personal scandal, yet he praises the quality of writing for being unemotional and factual. Apratim makes his first movie, and Aniket prefers buying a pirated CD to watch it rather than ask Apratim himself. Only in the last days of his life, battling failing health, the guise of the celebrity director falls apart and the loving father in him shows through.

Mamata Shankar and Jishu play the mother and son who make up the less celebrated main cast of the story. There couldn't have been a better choice to play Dipti, who holds her sophistication and restraint through the turmoils of her own life. She bears the agony of seeing her husband having an affair with her own protégé, yet like a high society woman accepts it and moves on to protect his public image. She plays the dutiful wife, attending to her octogenarian mother in law, discouraging her son's display of malice against his father and maintaining the household.

Like the other 3, Jishu's own character is multifaceted. Throughout the movie he plays the obedient restrained son, who has distanced himself from his father yet serves him diligently in his last days. You enjoy Apratim's transformation from being a carefree kid playing guitar in a rock band, to a serious film director, an obedient son and a patient husband.

The support cast does a good job too. Ria Sen plays the dumb-belle that she is. Laboni Sarkar plays Shikha's "differently abled" sister, displaying her acting skills even in such an insignificant role. Sumanta Mukherjee brings necessary gravity to the role of Natyasamrat Girish Ghosh, though his pronunciation skills get a bit in the way of "Aste Gela Dinomoni" - see the movie to understand. The most unexpected cameo comes from the woman who plays Aniket's octogenarian mother. As a lady who's lived her life and waiting for death to come and take her, she displays the mentality of a child when she demands her daughter-in-law serve her "pulao" and "Chow Mein", and breaks into an innocent smile when she's given chocolate.

A word about Rituparno Ghosh's direction. To start off, I've never seen a director who understands women so well, or brings out their feelings better. Some of his finest movies - Dahan, Dosar and Sab Charitra Kalponik - have had a woman as the central character who survives in a world where rules are set by the men. To give him credit, they are all brilliant movies. Sometimes Rituparno completely loses it - like Antarmahal or Chokher Bali, sometimes he makes mediocre movies like Raincoat. But in Abohoman, he is truly at his best. On one hand he brings out the best in Ananya and Mamata Shankar. On the other, his portrayal of the father-son relationship between Aniket and Apratim leaves you spellbound. A lot of filmmakers choose to portray superficial, single sided human relationships (everyone is either good or bad) to keep the plot moving. Rituparno dives into the core of the characters, brings out their innermost feelings and arranges them on cinematic canvas so succinctly and beautifully that you feel one with them. I also appreciate his queer technique of occasionally blacking out the screen where a character is citing a monologue. Perhaps it gives the viewers a chance to reflect on what is being said, rather than who's saying it. In Abohoman the technique is used very effectively.

The music is good too. Songs are largely absent and heard only in the most apt of places. “Krishnakali” with its cheeky lyrics (Did the poet know that Krishankali’s doe eyes were a result of her using too much Maskara?” brought a smile to my face.

Above all, as I said earlier, Abohoman is all about moments. Moments that tug at your heartstrings, moments of delicate emotion. There's one scene shot in a hotel room in Kurseong where Apratim has taken his terminally sick father for treatment. Apratim stands at the window reciting a Rabindranath Tagore poem. Whenever he forgets a line, you can hear his father shouting out the line from inside the bathroom. This little father-son game goes on for some time till suddenly there is no response from the bathroom. Apratim heads to the door, calling out to his father and fearing the worst. The door opens. You see Aniket standing with a helpless look on his face - "The Pyjama string has gone inside". Apratim breathes a sigh of relief and helps his father to the bed. As he's made to lie down, Aniket looks up with hazy eyes and asks his son "Are you taller than I am?" It pains you to see that even the great director Aniket Majumdar is after all a helpless father counting his last days.

In another scene, Apratim visits Shikha after his father's demise. He hears Shikha's account of the affair for the first time. He realizes Aniket was not really in love with Shikha herself, but with "Srimati", his ultimate creation, his puppet par excellence. In the end, Shikha asks Apratim if he would consider being in love with her. Apratim's hatred for the woman who destroyed his mother's personal life comes through. He says women like Shikha can only have affairs, they can't really love anyone. He says she is such a talented actress that most women would fail to understand the difference. Shikha doesn't reply. The sound of a conch and temple bell is heard in the distance. Shikha looks at the sky, closes her eyes and folds her hands in prayer. Her world merges with Binodini, a woman who’s theatre persona overshadowed her real self, who the world just wanted to conquer but not love, the woman who braved the storms of her life without a companion, the woman whose only solace was her undying faith in Thakur Ramkrishna Paramhansa.

Talking of moments, I really wanted to narrate the last scene, where Aniket is lying on his deathbed and tells his son "Is the light ready, I want to take a shot. Call Srimati now". I also wanted to mention the scene where Aniket has just passed away and Dipti is explaining to his mother why they are having a “party” and there are so many people in the house. But they might be spoilers, so I'll stop here.

Instead, I urge you to go watch Abohoman. If you're a Bengali, watch it today. If you're not, but you appreciate good cinema, still buy a DVD (the one's that come with English subtitles) and watch it today! It’s sad that I saw this more than 2 years after it was released. 


A full 10 out of 10.

An Introduction

"Why a dedicated blog on movie reviews", you might ask? "Who do you think you are, Raja Sen"?

For starters, unknown to many, I am a complete movie buff. I enjoy watching movies - any kind, any language, any genre. I watch them in greater detail than is possible for most human beings - down to remembering exact dialogue sequences in an entire scene, or what a certain character was attired in and how relevant it is to the scene at hand. Movie music imbibes itself in my brain, so much that years later a small portion of the main piece can make me recall what movie (and what scene) this music was from. This causes endless snubbing in the hands of my wife, as I reportedly don't enjoy even a fraction of my celluloid recall capabilities in real life!

I have long maintained that good cinema is not about a singular aspect. It is not about acting, direction, technique, cinematography or editing. There may be exceptions to this rule, like The Dirty Picture, where Vidya Balan's brilliant acting rescues an obvious plot and ordinary direction. But essentially good cinema is a combination of all things.

Sometimes, all these tangible elements come together to create something intangible, something that can be called just - magic. That's when good cinema becomes great cinema. Difficult to define magic, but easy to give examples. Take the scene in Casablanca, where Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to plead for her husband's life. She has betrayed him in love earlier, and it’s not easy to seek sympathy from a scorned lover. She cries, pleads for her husband's life, while the usually reserved Humphrey Bogart blazes on all guns and demands to know why she betrayed him. As the camera pans on to her beautiful face, tears on her cheek, bathed in moonlight streaming through the window, it creates a sort of cinematic magic the attentive viewer immerses himself in.

Or take the scene in Slumdog Millionaire - a much criticized film - where the slum children play cricket on the airfield and the guards shoo them off. They run through the dirty bylanes of Dharavi, being chased by the guards. All the time the camera shoots from the top. The clothes hung out to dry in the open, along with the polythene sheets that form the roofing of many shanties, create a cheerful ambience that brings a sense of colour and joyousness to the dreary slums.

The third "must mention" is the scene in Kurosawa's Kagemusha, where the beggar - who has been asked to play the king - discovers himself in the King's bedroom. The viewer enjoys the confusion on his face as he gets intimidated by the scale and grandeur of things, notably the bed. After loitering around for some time, he tries his best to make himself invisible. He huddles up into a corner of the room and goes to sleep on the floor. Again, superb acting, direction and photography blend into a magical scene which you want to rewind and watch again and again.

What should you expect from this blog? For one, I'm not a professional movie critic, no one invites me to premieres. Many great movies have lived their theater life and receded into video discs available over the counter at a discount store, before I've had the time or inclination to see them. So don't come looking for reviews of the latest and greatest.

What I do plan to write, is in-depth reviews of movies that have TOUCHED me, compelled me to watch them again and again, and then pick up the pen (ok ok, the keyboard) and write why they touched me. So the only reason I want you to be here, is to find unbiased, critical, objective analyses of movies. Trust me, anything that gets above 7 stars in my 10 point scale is worth a watch!

And now that you know I'm not a very humble man, lets share another personal opinion. Raja Sen, I think, is a biased and not so smart movie critic :-).