SCREEN:NISHIJAPAN:AVOYAGE OF INTROSPECTION. BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE INDIAN EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, INDIA \JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AND FRIBOURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWISS CURATOR INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS R.D.Bansal Presents. Produced by Kamal Bansal, Story- Narayan Ganguly, Sceenplay, Music and Direction: Sandip Ray, Camera: Barun Raha, Editor: Subrata Roy, Costume: Lolita Ray Casting: Soumitra Chatterjee, Deepankar De, Rituparna Sengupta, Raima Sen, Parambrata and Sabyasachi Chakraborty. A waft of tinged-mist hovering on the screen with a rhythm of its own. The title twinkles out on the screen. A soft pan brings into our ken the heritage cottage on the hill-top where a group of relatives and a close friend seem to be taking a short sojourn owned by Bimal Das.. Cups of tea and plates shuffle across the small table with two faces of old friends, frozen in chill. Female voice takes over the sound track and we encounter a full view of the shot, showing us the characters one by one with a subtle cut. Thus Sandip Rays Nishijapan (After the Night…Dawn), his sixth feature film in a row, shown at different International Film Festivals, begins with a Mozartian resonance and probes our interior layers of souls, never visible unless hit hard by events of deeper significance. The film mothers a plot that heightens the spirit of the work. A plot Sandip Ray, like his father, the great Satyajit Ray, very much pins upon in his films and artistically dovetails it with form and structure, enriching the inner content. It is a house-warming sabbatical and the head of the family Bimal Das, the father who stays at Kalimpong for a long time, is with his two sons, Nirmal, a military doctor, working at Pune and Shaymal, a student and intellectual, Nirmals wife Anita and his sister-in-law Sunita, his friend Brojen Lahiri, a religious man, a superstitious article, all placed with their individual positions in quaint key. They are supposed to stay for a few days and then dissolve into their respective chores of work. Set up in a secluded, quiet hill-top, the cottage is surrounded by sylvan forests, a bubbling silvery cascade, a hanging temporary bridge, the only communication between two worlds, inside and outside, between the cottage and the rest of the hill. Everything was going fine punctuated with jokes, humours, puns, dinner-table plesantry and all that jazz. But the moment a night quake strikes the cottage and its inmates, destroying the edifice of the vintage cottage, upchucking the cook Ram down a huge gorge of the hill, snapping the wooden bridge, the life-line for the survivors, spills open a misunderstanding, domestic disunity, suspicion, spats, psychological tremors leading to a poignant finale marked by cannibalistic instincts. Earth quake not only shatters the surface exteriors but also dents the interiors of the characters beyond redemption. Shortage of food, water scarcity, power-failure and finally cruel isolation crank open the darker niches of the characters who so long seem to have appeared as normal, intelligent humans. When finally relief team arrives, each character -right from Bimal Das, Nirmal, Anita, Shyamal, Sunita to Brojenbabu stand face to face with a reality shameful, bizarre, inhuman, cannibalistic and Kierkegardian. Nishijapan rips open the pathos that lie beneath the exterior surface of the characters. Surely it has a plot; the plot has a semblance with our existential living, often good and again very harsh, when dissected threadbare. I just make it my paradigm to probe each character as etched in the script/film and treatment, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. Fallibility is more human, you should know. To vet the inner movement let me take each character and his/her social standing with domestic backdrop, looking although safe and sedate, calm and flaky. Biamlabau and His Micro Universe. Bimalbabu is somewhat in a wee way is the central force round which the dramaturgy/plot moves with a slow adagio. He is a person, now retired, with a freedom of his own and leaves in a hill station with his caretaker alone. Hilly ambience has provided him a life-energy and new meaning of life. In a half-deserted vintage cottage, Bimalbabu lives alone, his best companions being books and nature and like Wordsworth has learnt to grow with the its inner rhythm though he never believes in pantheism. His is world, full of everyday reality and dreams that swell in relationship to his familial tie with his sons, their wife and his only friend, frequenter to his domestic housewarming party. His wife being long dead, Bimalbabu, laments for nothing as he could acclimatize with a new reality for the last two decades or so. He is a man of certain ideals, human values and social bliss that he makes his main agenda for survival. Once in year his two sons and his only daughter-in-law (eldest sons wife) pay a visit to him and spend some joyous times and hours with their father, helping him/them to renew their life from the rut-existence. Bimalbabu being guided by his social ideals and morality has helped his two sons to get education, social prestige, some social standing that make them a product of pride to their father. A pure martinet, Bimalbabu thinks that despite all round despair, frustration, social degradation, corruption et al, life is worth living and as a human being he believes there could be an end of the tunnel and one should really wait with patience to dream of better days since we are all passing through a zone, we either pass through or fall. For him life is something like that of Sisyphus, condemned to bear and carry a huge burden you dont have to lament. He is like Satyajit Rays one man colossus, submitting to none, keeping his integrity in tact even when caught in a world of murky greed and graft. He stands like an oak tree and observes, in a turn of wheeling dramatic, oddball situations, his own belief, faith, ethos crumbling; life is like that, he trusts. For a moment, he falters while facing a brusque reality, very harsh, very cruel, vis-à-vis a disastrous encounter with his sons, daughter-in-law and the guest friend. He is not phallocentric, neither he is an obstruction to womens lib. Here I find, with a scratch on the surface, the structure preface that according to Derrida text becomes open at both ends. It is believed that the text has no stable identity, stable origin, says Derrida, each act of reading the text is a preface to the text. The reading of self-professed preface is no exception to this rule. Is it possible to scan Bimalbabu and his instant actions under this rule/canon? Perhaps yes. For each reading seems to mutate the meaning of the text that the senior character projects and more we read it the more we cull meaning out of it. The kind of simulacrum used in the fabric of the film only intensifies ones respect for the fatherly character, geared to sustain balance between many undue glitches. His is a character, fastened on to classicism and its elements, poses to be loved and respected by all. His mental equanimity is unique and remarkable that it sways all and sundry, getting involved in the process of its progression. Sandips conceiving of the character nearly borders on Jean Renoirs concept of creating characters and resembles their good nature and human values, marked by cool passion. Like Renoir, the director believes in showing a simple kind of universe, a universe where one can feel at ease with nature and with ones friends where one can simply live a child-like existence with the need for a moral decision, this longing is less a theme in Sandips work than an aspect of their atmosphere, a amoral quality that is the mood the create. And trust me, if some one tries to sketch this longing will be undoubtedly be a recurring motif. In this film, it contributes greatly to their human quality, to their immense compassion for all living things. It also accounts for their formal imperfection, the sense that most of his work gives us that the potential power of individual moments is often greater than the clarity of the whole. While looking at the ripping open of the character, one observes the powerful mood his film creates, its sense of humanity, the sombre grey quality that pervades his treatment and style - these qualities always win over the allegiance of his audience. Said Renoir on art: The perfect object is dead. Nearly stepping into Renoirs shoes, Sandip wants to catch life through the impressions it makes during one moment of its existence. The film echoes of what Renoir thinks of art; it says the purpose of art is to catch a little bit of the truth of a tree or a human being. In a rare crux of turmoil of cross-sentiments and blues, we discover Bimalbabu, the epitome of the film, to be a non-believer and like the great Satyajit Ray turns out to be an atheist. Also agnostic, only filtered through some minimal exchange of words and feelings, Bimalbabu is an antithesis, to be sure. Among the group of characters, sternly confused in a special situation, Bimalababu, when hugely perturbed by cannibalistic moods, holds cool and hangs tough to counter it. He is equally reluctant and disinterested in codes of religion or religious faith on images/idols demonstrated by his blurred friend Brojaenbabu, who is a patsy to opium of religion and faith on Gods. Contrasted with this man, too strong a believer in mystic happenings, Bimalbabu stays cool, sedate, intelligent, reverent to his own idea of self-standing and reasoning. To display complicated conflicts of religious faiths, often sought for in times dangers and destruction, is not an easy thing. Particularly, reasoning against conventional religious faith and taking a stand against it, is a very, very hard task. To make it plausible is yet a more a ticklish lark. But Sandip, given the dramatic explosion among various characters, trims most elegantly the uneven contours and nodes, and tackles the frame of events with brilliant acumen and coolness; his is a treatment that certainly conceals the apparent fissures that might have tilted his film to wobbly one. But instead, through a pure emotion and logical dramaturgy, if any, he controls the most complex fission and lifts the film to a new height, a height of epiphany. Also his association with his daughter-in-law, quite favourite and intelligent, knowledgeable and alert, sharp and cozy, brings into open space a delicate but humane elements of compassion and respect. Nishijapan is a film with a thesis. The director has not spared the dogmatic husband Nirmal, having an extramarital bent with a woman, Anitas meteoric suspicion about her father-in-law, the religious hypocrite and mercenary Brojenbabu, his lunatic fury on his old friend Bimal, a man with full of humility. In the midst of a thick cruel reality only two characters Shymal and Sunita live out with their individuality and human vision. It is their hidden, sublime love that uplifts them-selves above the ordinary, low-down postures, the smallness of minds, self-greed and human insularity that rips open during their short stay on the hill. Here Sandip acts as a master psychologist: the pain for us is deeper because he probes deep into the malaise of the old and the modern people. He helps humiliation illuminate the inhuman conducts and cathartic tension each character suffers from. No artist has done more than Sandip to make us re-evaluate the commonplace. Here we notice male chauvinism and women estate (represented by Anita and Sunita), the greatest film to date by a great director. Our identification with each character is so sustained that Sandip can change our mood simply by shifting focus to bring somebody else into view. What is distinctive in his film is that sense of imminence - the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of this work seems not slow or picky but rather meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on. The film is marked by a rapt, contemplative quality of the highest degree. That natural fusion of daily drama is a strong element in any good film is once again poetically proved by the director. This critic is stunned by the powerful poetic sense of time of the sensitive director. He has made it a work of art, miles away from a tract. I find the muted emotions embedded in the film more interesting. It certainly is more challenging for a filmmaker. As an artist Sandip likes to present problems and makes the public conscious of the presence of certain social problems and lets them think of themselves. Like the great Ray, Sandip shows a certain taking of sides is unavoidable, if you have strong sympathies of your own. So in a sense he is committing himself and I dont think its necessary, important and right for an artist to provide answers. In his elegant treatment the directors seems to suggest emotional gestures fascinate him more than ideological gestures. Luminous part of the film lies in the treatment of women characters like Anita and Sunita played by Rituparna Sengupta and Raima Sen respectively. Anita in particular assumes the icon of Jungs archetype mother, though childless in the film. His handling of women characters reminds me of the great Ray who have studied women as agents for filtering truth and morality by her emanation of intellection. Sandip moves closer to this truth with more panache. Use of sound track and visual metaphors are an asset to the film. Musical structure of the film as well as the poignant use of Tagore song such as Bondu Raho… presented by brilliant Kamalini Mukherjee is simply great and memorable. It only enhances the monstrous pathos invading the film and the shaken characters. Moods of rare shades are created by subtle syntax and lissome movement created by the director with imagination. Rituparna once again displays her acting metier with a passion and poses to justify the trauma of archetype mother. Raima and Pramabrata as Sunita and Shyamal slice out their best plausible performance here. Soumitra Chatterjee as Bimal, the retired, old father sinks deep into the image. Deepankar De as religious freak and shameless glutton shines in the role. Sabyasachi Chakraborty as Nirmal offers his instinctive best as martinet military doctor showing dubiety. Barun Rahas camera work plays a hidden character in the film and locates the tiniest of things in a rare visual osmosis. Costume design, like in her previous works, by Lolita Ray adds to the wonder of the film. I should admit Nishijapan is a film that displays Sandip Rays creative imagination and it appears as the most impressively apparent in the moral order he imposes on experience. His actual method of describing sequences and characters is very, very empiric and luminous. In the visible as much as much as in the moral world he accentuates the traits which, in his view, give his characters individuality, heightens the lights, darkens the shadows. The way the film impresses all, he should collect kudos for his experiments as it avoids cotton-picking arbitrary characters, dis-articulated, cut off from life, as certain as modern paintings. This is a film absolutely made in harmony with the rhythm of human breathing. ENDS
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 09:00:13 +0000
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