Starring: Paoli Dam, Roopa Ganguly, Saswata Chatterjee, Bratya Basu, Rajatava and others
Directed by Debesh Chattopadhyay
Rating: ***
A ‘kheya’ is a boat. In Natoker Moto, the protagonist, called Kheya, is seen drowning in the first shot—she plunges into a river; her dead body is fished out later. Is it suicide or murder? That’s the mystery that unspools in the next two hours as an investigating officer reconstructs Kheya’s past and pieces together the truth. But, based on a true story—the life of Keya Chakraborty, the reigning queen of the Bengali stage in the ’70s—this is no racy thriller.
Kheya’s story emerges through interrogations of those closest to her: her estranged husband, her film producers, her directors, her professors, schoolfriends and her grieving mother. It takes shape through the prism of their individual perspectives and fading, pain-laced, tear-filled memories and self-preserving confessionals. Through truths, half-truths, downright lies.
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Kheya is a girl, a woman, a wife, a daughter, a teacher but, most importantly, an actress. She is passionately devoted to each of the roles life has thrust upon her, but doesn’t realise that she has to choose. “Don’t go to the play this evening,” says the man she fell in love with—and married—while they were both idealistic student activists, as she wants to catch a new rendition of Antigone at Calcutta’s Academy of Fine Arts. “But on your way back home from work get some fish,” he adds, when it's clear she’s going. It builds up until she can’t take it—the stifling of her creativity; the questioning of her talent; the unspoken competitiveness; the occasional accusations of promiscuity. Debesh Chattopadhyay, a known theatre director, has, in his film debut, excelled with this superbly sensitive delineation of the complexity of a woman’s situation as she battles on just to survive on her own terms. Her innate passion for her work is not an aggressive feminist stance; her passion for her husband too is real, not a conformity to the traditions of conjugality—one threatens the other; the opposing pull tears her free spirit apart.
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Interestingly, Chattopadhyay does not delve too much into the psychological. He concentrates on the circumstantial. For example, the moment when, seeing her daughter’s body on a cot, bedecked for the funeral pyre, Roopa Ganguly breaks down and sobs, “Why have you put so much vermillion on her forhead?...she doesn’t wear any sindoor.” It makes its point emphatically.
Though the performances are powerful, they are not uniformly so. These are the best: Paoli’s expression of that engulfing emptiness, ‘this is not the life I wanted’; Roopa’s grief-stricken sprint down the stairs; Saswata’s hostility-filled glare as he sizes up his wife and thespian Amitesh (Bratya); Rajatava’s interaction with the spot boy in the end.
In the end, Chattopadhyay’s Kheya does drown but he shows us that she doesn’t sink.