Bombay, meri jaan

Almost eleven years back in the summer of Mumbai, me and a couple of friends meandered through a few shabby lanes in search for a ‘home’. We were all new to ‘Bombay’, graduates from ‘Calcutta’ looking for something in our lives. I did manage to scrape through to Pune, months later, which in those days used to remain a bit laid-back as compared to Bombay and more to my liking. But Bombay didn’t spare me. My girlfriend then was in Bombay and so I visited the city alternate weeks – from Vile Parle to Dadar, from CST to Santa Cruz, to my friends in Borivli and my cousin at Anushaktinagar. Why so much of a personal gibberish? Cause the film which re-winded my memories is indeed personal – for me, and for many migrants like me who wanted to cope with her – Mumbai to all and Bombay to few including me.

This personal element is what made Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghaat so irresistible to me. Seducer and the seduced all form a part here – sucked in the labyrinth of life. Take Shai, the New Yorker who came to stay in Bombay for a time to shoot photographs. Isn’t New York similar in essence – a dream merchant to immigrants from all over the globe? Yes she is. Shai remains the seducer – the typical exploiter who stretches the soft bearings of a naïve Munna to her advantage. She coaxes him and turns him to her guide in places otherwise she would find difficult to move around – a city which can be so unknown to her own people. And times so uncannily dreadful. Yet, when Munna hands over Arun’s new address to Shai why is there a tear in her crimson eyes? Isn’t she been seduced as well? That’s the charm of the city where personal equations mingle into a collective matrix of lights and shades, longings of humane hue merged into the waves of a bustling Arabian Sea. That is how Tushar Kanti Ray’s camera holds on the lanes and by lanes with surreptitious pander opening up to the grandeur wide-angles of the sea that nurtures the seven islands and this metro. In one of the interviews long before the film was released, Kiran mentioned that she herself an immigrant to the city always felt that each of those rented flats had a story to tell – a story that it carries as persons move in, stay and then move out. This is the microcosm of the metropolis as well – people come and go and yet each leaves one’s mark, miniscule, but that indeed changes the city every time.

It therefore comes as no wonder that Arun’s creative juices flowed by the voyeuristic gaze into a quartet of mini-dv cassettes that he inherited due to tenant-ship. In some deft minimal shots we find Shai looking into Arun’s windows from the opposite construction site when Arun look into those videos where Yashmin is seen to record the daily chores of a neighbour. This circularity of gaze makes the city so vulnerable as well. A vulnerability of a modern day city life, not only Bombay, where you are always been monitored and tracked down. This verity of reality can be disastrous as Yashmin finds out. One of the characters who always speak to Arun and to us through her video diaries meant for her brother, we see how a joyous and sparkling young girl succumbs to the perils of a diabolic milieu. Yashmin is so poignantly beautiful, so vibrant in her love, her nostalgic remembering of her ancestral house in MP that you connect to her immediately. She takes on the city on the full and perishes.

If Yashmin resembles a victim, who does the neighbouring aunt represent? A leitmotif of the city herself? Dumb, speechless, neutral? She well may be. One to whom all these migratory characters come with questions and return unanswered. In Bombay it is you who have to find an answer, to survive or fade away, you have to decide – the city won’t wait, the city can’t wait. Gustavo Santaolalla’s music is soul stirring – like the drumming of incessant rains all round you. Soon you will find water everywhere, trickling down and drowning you. Tushar Kanti Roy’s camera is liberal and following a script that is loose. Defining shots hence are at times juxtaposed edgily leaving a sense of incomplete absolute. In a film which gropes about being all over the place in a smart and chic city this isn’t a big aberration to me. Rather, it came as a different take, a new diced view alternate to the prevalent middle-of-the-road Bollywood contemporary cinema. As compared to the mostly hapless Bengali cinema where nostalgia is soaked only in having a mindset which is a generation old, I have cherished, followed and supported the new breed of Hindi films which have peeked into a clear and sassy image of a metropolis. Be it Delhi in Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye or Khsola ka Ghosla or Bheja Fry, Mithya, Ek Chalis ka last Local and the host of other films on the blasts and the underworlds of Bombay viz  A Wednesday, Black Friday, Mumbai Meri Jaan.  All these films set up a trend where the apparent realities of the city get on with the unnatural and unseen takes of it – matter-of-fact. Kiran Rao’s script just gave a break to this trend here where the new and the old mingle in old houses, old classical music renditions and more importantly in soft focuses and saturated colours on the screen palette. For those with a weak heart like this essayist, this surely works. It works more because in so many situations you have the same smile on your face as the characters have, your own reminisces and at times you do have a drop of tear – for Yashmin, for Shai, for your Bombay and more so for yourself.

As I have happily settled to Kolkata for long, Dhobi Ghaat gave me that chance to sit back and harp the innumerable little happiness the city gave to me, washed away by the tides of life but resurfaced again. And like Arun, I raise a toast to my muse – Bombay, meri jaan.

Closed spaces in Tokhon Teish

Nostalgia is one important constituent in the Bengali life. This might be a sweeping statement, standing a risk of drawing flak from critics. But that is what one feels after viewing majority of the contemporary Bengali films. Be it placing yesteryear heroines together ‘after a gap’ of N number of years, or making up a thirty-ish struggling actor in the mould of the biggest matinee idol of the land – we have seen it all. So it comes as a respite when I chanced upon Atanu Ghosh’s second feature film Tokhon Teish (Then 23, 2010). Atanu’s first feature Angshumaner Chhobi (Angshuman’s film, 2009) did raise hope in dealing with complicated themes with relative ease and sensitivity. There were questions, both cinematically and philosophically as to the position the director wants to take – his intentions opposing his credentials at times. It is heartening to see that only in his second film Atanu got few things right for him – setting up the tempo quite high, mélange of characters and events keeping the viewers busy and tracking with a theme that’s urbane and contemporary.

It needs to be emphasized that like his earlier film or his telefilms, Atanu here also walks his known path – different stories mingling into one comprehensive theme – an urban lore of contemporary hue. That is the reason we find the city with its throbbing reality – pace. A number of shots on the streets all marked with the pace of a hapless city – confused in trying to be contemporary. We see top shots where all the highs and lows are ‘sized’ up and where characters wish to climb higher than the others for a bit of extra space. This is an image that will linger for being repetitive – the hero’s mother Sraboni and teacher Meghna once and when the soft-porn actress Mohini fled from her hospital room to the terrace of the same. In two different earlier scenes we find Sraboni and Meghna first discuss their rift with Tomodeep in a closed frame – that of an indoor; and in the enacted scenes of the soft porns where Mohini is constantly running away from a group of men – the typical representation of the hunter and the hunted in South Indian soft porn movies where the exercise of power both sexual and otherwise was claimed thus. The director probably tries to uplift his characters to a height in search for freedom.

The contemporariness also is injected in the story studded with references of New Media – a generation literally breeding on Orkut and Facebook, virtual talk-shows trying to smooth real issues of life. This is cut across with an opening scene where we come to know that Tomodeep frequents a dilapidated film theatre that screens pornographic films made in South India – he actually watches particular films that cast Mohini as the sex siren. In an age where pornography is easily accessible over the internet and DVDs its an interesting characterization. This is because, those theatre halls still thrive on the basic fodder of pornographic films and amidst a crowd of rickshaw-wallahs and auto-drivers (potentially representing that stratum of society who cannot afford a computer to watch porno films) there are still many who are remarkably out-of-place like Tomodeep. Does this mean Tomodeep also needs some space like the three women mentioned above and he finds it in his shared remembrance of Mohini – in hall and in his private room? There are two other major characters as well – Sriparna, a law student who is unusually simple in her quest to find different shades of men met over the internet and Sandipan, who is a corporate with a mysterious life. Sandipan is associated with an NGO which run a destitute home where Sampa (Mohini’s actual name) was an inmate. In few of the soft and delicately romantic moments in the film we find Sandipan taking Sriparna to his personal chamber – a dimly lit room cramped with varied and peculiar accessories; he tells Sriparna to enjoy darkness like he does. This is the place which gives Sandipan the much needed space – a physical space whereas Sriparna satiates her hunger in the real meeting spaces cohabiting with virtual friends.

So in essence the film is about the closed spaces of contemporary lives where multiple openings simultaneously shut us down even more – from the self and then from the ‘other’. And in this paired existence fighting the ‘inner’ with the ‘outer’ all the time, we need our admission to cleanse our soul. So we find Sraboni confesses to Meghna, Meghna to her listeners, Sriparna to Sandipan, Sandipan to his invalid wife, Tomodeep to Meghna / Sriparna. This need for confession is again a post-modern trait where-in the roles of the donor (who confesses) and the receiver (who hears the confession) get reversed and multiplied. We find Tomodeep confessing at different levels - to Sriparna he speaks of his problems with his mother and about Mohini, to Mohini he reverberates his fantasies and passion –sexual and romantic.

The value system in a middle-class urban milieu is handled in a matured way – not only does Meghna talk about pornographic viewing as a very natural extension of human desire in her talk-show but also the way Sriparna, Tomodeep and Tomodeep’s doctor colleague discuss it. This again acts as an intriguing contrast – the initial scenes of a pornographic film that titillates its viewers as well as the viewers of this film vis-à-vis the absolute played down of any carnal instinct that may emanate from the rest of the film. However, one deterrent in the film is the sluggish second half. Just as mentioned in the beginning of this essay that the first half of the film is quite savvy in its exposition of the nuances of the multifarious existences of a city life, the second half lacks the same zeal. Agreed, there are equations to be matched and in the process of keeping few of the threads untied, the second half somewhat lost its pace quite a bit. In this regard it was probably worthy of mentioning that a film like this which moves around quite elegantly in different spatial spheres need not always be mandated to venture newer temporal domains as well. In trying to move back an forth on the arrow of time, I feel, the film essentially lost some patina.

Acting is a bonus here – Paoli Dam as Meghna surprises with her repressed angst mixed with seductive charm. Jisshu Sengupta is typical but Rajatava Dutta as Sandipan is a revelation.  His apparent non-modulated voice throw coupled with a cold stare and a dejected hobble will surely etch Sandipan in the minds of the audience for long. The others did justice though Indrani Halder’s wig seemed hackneyed. Another detail to which the director might look into – all the characters are so neatly dressed even at home and at any hour of the day – an unrealistic trait which Bengali TV serials probably brought into the realms of Bengali cinema.

Atanu Ghosh as a director has scored quite a few points here as mentioned earlier. His cinematic vision seemed more mature in the way he mixed different snippets of life into one whole. This film is more ‘cinematic’ than its predecessor as far as the craft goes, the intercuts between the different stories that traverse at different pace, the grand final shot of Tomodeep and Sampa (and not Mohini) as a couple relishing rain – the soundscape as vibrant as the frame – celebration of life. In this complex web Atanu maintained a semi-linear narrative which is difficult (the second half was more linear and hence sluggish) but he managed it well – where the craft held him a bit down he nourished it with the content. The rendition of Joyeeta Chakraborty’s Tumi gao was such a potent exhibition where form and content merge to create a successful cinematic moment. For most of Tokhon Teish Atanu Ghosh succeeded in creating this passion. This film needs a slightly mature viewer-ship.  We can only hope that audience can rise up to this offering.