Art & Entertainment

Goynar Baksho (The Jewellery Box)

This enchanting and humorous tale is also a heartrending tale of loneliness and longing

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Goynar Baksho (The Jewellery Box)
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Starring: Moushumi Chatterjee, Konkona Sen Sharma, Srabanti Biswas
Directed by Aparna Sen
Rating: *** 

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 At the heart of this enchanting and humorous tale about Pishima or Aunt Rashmoni, who becomes a ghost and hovers around her sole earthly possession—a box of exquisite gold jewellery—is also a heartrending tale of loneliness and longing. Aparna Sen turns the classic Shirshendu Mukherjee story Rashmonir Shonadana into a memorable saga spanning the lives of three generations of women in a Bengali zamindar family, exploring themes as varied as values and valuables, jealousies and joint families, love and the liberation movement. Married at the tender age of 11 and widowed only a year later, the haughty and beautiful Rashmoni is forced to lead a life of austerity and celibacy. Her only pleasures are insidious—from preening in front of the mirror wearing her precious ornaments to seducing the family servant. So all-consuming are the den­ials of her unfulfilled life, made of unrequited love and lust, she resents others and hankers even after her death.

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The director powerfully captures the paradox of how flimsy human social norms fashion life-binding, soul-threatening nooses in a transient world. Lives in the material world and their petty attachments are constantly and effortlessly juxtaposed with the misty, spectral image of the other world to drive home this irony. Its central motif: the jewellery in the box which continues to exist even after its owner has perished.

Moushumi’s Pishima is as enduring as Konkona’s Somlata is entertaining. Srabonti’s young Pishima grows on us more than the character of her double role as the grand niece. Indeed, it is the meandering plot, traversing as it does into the third generation and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, where the film begins to falter.

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The ending has its own relevance, leading us to a supremely liberating closure, but it nevertheless drags on, lacking the character, even losing the humour, of the rest of the movie. That can be forgiven and forgotten. What lingers—like the dazzle of the gold in the box—is the brilliant cinematography. The play of light and shade—capturing all those hues of life and death. 

High Fives

Bollywood

  1. Nautanki Saala
  2. Commando
  3. Chasme Baddoor
  4. Himmatwala
  5. Jolly LLB

Hollywood

  1. Pain & Gain
  2. Oblivion
  3. 42
  4. The Big Wedding
  5. The Croods

R&B/Hip Hop

  1. Save Rock and Roll (Fall Out Boy)
  2. Mosquito (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
  3. Paramore (Paramore)
  4. Night Visions (Imagine Dragons)
  5. Babel (Mumford & Sons)

Courtesy: Film Information

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