Starring: Soumitra Chattopadhyay, Swatilekha Sengupta, Rituparna Sengupta and others
Directed by Nandita Roy, Shiboprosad Mukherjee
Rating: ***
Biswanath Majumdar, an elderly bookseller, tells his wife, Arati, that he has an important announcement to make to the family and asks her to call up their children and ask them to gather at the house. Certain that he will divulge the details of his will, they bring their spouses and children along for what they feel will be a long overdue family reunion. What follows stuns them. Biswanath reveals that he has begun formal proceedings to divorce Arati, to whom he has been married for 49 years. He will leave her the house, along with most of their property. He would move to their country house in Shantiniketan and wants to be left completely alone.
The emotional havoc that his decision—which shakes to the core a foundation of well-settledness—wreaks on everyone, especially his wife and even himself, and how each deals with it constitutes the main plot of this human drama about the failure of communication, about confusing notions of love, about unexpressed expectations and finally the breakdown of a marriage. The directors explore these universal themes, localising them with details of Bengali life. A housewife who herself doesn’t know when she grew into a grandmother, finding a lifetime of happiness in fulfilling the wishes of others—cooking, praying to Durga for their well-being, drying herself after her bath with the same wet towel which her husband had used. “For me all this was love,” she tells her husband after the judge urges them to try to talk to each other. “You were always busy with the family, you never had time for me,” he blurts out, as bottled up grievances burst forth.
Veteran thespians Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta are outstanding as they communicate to us all those uncommunicated tangled feelings between Biswanath and Arati—the confusion, the hurt, the betrayal, the love, and the hopes which with the years grow stale. Biswanath's expression of bewilderment and pain as one of his daughters (played excellently by Rituparno) charges him with selfishness and callousness about her mother makes a heart-wrenching scene, depicting an old man’s desperation not to be misunderstood.
What brings the film’s ratings down is the substandard humour. While the attempt to break the grimness of the subject with comedy is appreciated and there is enough laughter embedded in the script, scenes such as the sons-in-law trying to get a servant drunk on Scotch to find out from him whether the old man was having an affair is executed poorly. (It’s another matter, and a matter of concern that shows the degeneration of Bengali humour, that these scenes, which I did not find funny at all, did elicit quite a few laughs in the audience.) Biswanath’s disappointment to learn from his wife that she worshipped Uttam Kumar and him asking her, “You didn’t like Soumitra?” was, however, hilarious.
