Baksho Bondi (ShadowBox) Review: Tillotama Shome anchors the drama with fine-steel spirit and immense soul

In their debut feature, Baksho Bondi, Saumyananda Sahi and Tanushree Das take hold of a familiar image—a working-class woman on a cycle, darting through a Kolkata suburb—and mine from it drama spun with textured hardiness and emotional nuance. The opening expertly establishes the daily rhythms of Maya’s (Tillotama Shome) life. As streets and neighbourhoods of Barrackpore start to wake into activity, she trundles out on her cycle, pushing through a series of jobs to keep her household running. She’s the sole breadwinner of her family.

Her husband, Sundar (Chandan Bisht), has the reputation of being somewhat a kookie outlier. For a hobby, he collects frogs assiduously and supplies them to colleges on his own whim. This is a man wedged deep within PTSD; his trauma still fresh. Nine years after he took VRS from the army, he struggles with regular life. A trip to the saloon, an encounter with the razor triggers his paranoia. People see Sundar as an oddity, incapable of handling his trauma. As much as Maya is determined to find him a job, he flees the scene or never even shows up. Along with their teenage son, Debu (a revelatory Sayan Karmakar), Maya acts as a caregiver for Sundar, watching out for him. He rambles around, a wastrel whom most would rather avoid.

There’s so much Maya has to weather just to get through the day. Sahi and Das excel at encapsulating the cramped inescapable-ness of middle-class suburban lives. One of India's foremost DPs, Sahi’s camera initially tends to register the narrative milieu, alert to the bustle in the background, vivid details in the two modest rented rooms the family lives in (immaculately lived in production design by Mausam Aggarwal), before finally swerving to intense, kinetically expressive close-ups. The background increasingly recedes, as proximity to characters, their upheavals shift to the center.

The stream of local chatter barging its way into individual ways is ruthless—full-throttle, high-pitched quarrels and gossip find intonations in the film. There’s little kindness Maya receives; slivers hurled come with caveats, reminding her of her place. She might nudge her brother for some help, but is quick to pull back the minute he’s patronising. To Maya, her small home is its own silo, a shelter against the storm of the outside world and its barrage of thoughtless, cruel rulings. Sahi and Das sharpen moments of realisation in this subtle, emotionally drama, every beat clasping layers of hurt and desperation.

At the centre of Baksho Bondi is Shome—tender, fierce and wrenching—a spectacular force to behold. Watch the flicker on her face, going from anticipation and hope to a toughening recoil, in a scene when Maya seeks a coaching centre suggestion for her son. The employer who might have seemed compassionate, less severe, instantly slaps in her face the limit of her means. She ought not to have such dreams that exceed her place. Couldn’t he practise driving? It’s suggested that might be more realistic. As someone from a lower socio-economic strata, all she’s ever advised is to lower her expectations, keep desires in check, make do with what’s immediately available.

Maya’s persistence in leading her life on her terms, refusing a shred of pity from anyone, is her superpower. We aren’t offered an elaborate backstory into Maya and Sundar’s relationship but the frostiness between Maya’s mother and her tells us all about the rifts that cracked the family apart with her choice of husband. But ample clues lie in the film’s setting itself. Barrackpore’s military linkages imply how Maya might have run into Uttarakhand-born Sundar. We can gauge the lifelong conflicts, disfavour, the spurning between Maya and her parents her marriage to him shook into play.

She stands by her decisions, doggedly prepared to meet the harshest situations in their fallout. There’s plenty misfortune for her to get completely lost and overwhelmed. However, her extraordinary resilience powers her through it all.

There’s this incredible sense of unbreakable dignity, a self-assuredness that often floats through Shome’s attitude towards her characters. In more than a scene in Baksho Bondi, one almost senses shades of Ratna’s sturdy spirit (Shome’s character in Rohena Gera’s 2018 film, Sir). The actress is able to infuse everyday seemingly small acts of survival with endless reserves of steel, a magnificent fortitude. But we also see her hover close to snapping point, strains of needing consolation, comfort. At her best, she can arrest the entire tide of a film. Sahi and Das are wise enough to gift Shome moments that might have been puny in other lesser dramas but, in her hands, assume a gale-force of inner churn.

Great performances fold together not just heartbreak and defiant energy, but also sneak in near-uncanny notes of apprehension. It’s when we can just about intuit a shadow flit across someone’s presence and being. The face, the scene darkens to a half-imperceptible degree. There’s an indelible moment when Maya falls asleep and what she feared, strikes; in the flashes before the shock, Shome’s presence evokes something phantom-like, tinged with life quasi-sunken in routine despair. She carries fatigue, but we also glimpse her face lighting up with delight when Maya sees the tournament trophy she’d won back in school.

Baksho Bondi wends up to a pair of tremendous scenes between the couple—one confrontational, chafing and seething, the other resigned and sobering. It’s an extraordinary feat to juxtapose the oscillating emotional tone of these scenes. Maya goes through pretty arduous stuff, nevertheless Baksho Bondi never lets her surrender to being downcast and utterly defeated. As much as her trials seem endless, we know, with her tenacity and belief she has in love, she’ll pull through.

Baksho Bondi (ShadowBox) premiered at Berlinale 2025 in the Perspectives competition.