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A poet and his poetry have been cinematically well rendered in Rituparno Ghosh’s Rituparno Ghosh is right to complain that his Bengali films often do not get the mainstream attention they deserve. His latest film, Shob Charitro Kalponik (All Characters are Imaginary) deserves both national and international accolades for a simple reason: very rarely in the world of Indian cinema a poet and his poetry have been cinematically well rendered.
The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialised language of literary history assign different meanings to words but the achievement of Ghosh’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse the commingling and collision of poetic creation and marital passion. The story is from Radhika’s (Bipasha Basu) point of view. Positioned within a series of flashback where characters move back and forth between space and time, the stress is on the fast-eroding relationship between Radhika and her husband Indraneel (Prosenjit). Their dynamically opposite ideology, language, and upbringing creates a crack, which pushed to the edge, drives Radhika to confide to her colleague Shekhar (Jisshu Sengupta) that she will divorce Indraneel. Just then, Radhika, who is in Jamshedpur is told that Indraneel has died of a heart attack in their home in Calcutta. Her world collapses. She rushes back to find their flat decorated with white flowers, his garlanded photograph, his body prostrate dressed in white. A tributary function in memory of Indraneel, who had recently won a top literary award, tells Radhika that his poetry was soaked with memories they shared as husband and wife. And as Radhika listens to his poetry recited by noted poets and elocutionists, a unique bond evolves between a husband now with her, not in flesh, but in spirit and in emotion. Ghosh is one of modern Indian cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s ‘dark continent’ with scepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation as we have seen in his earlier Choker Bali and Antarmahal. The movie, thus, belongs to Radhika, played with mesmerising vitality and heart-stopping candour by Basu. She achieves a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Shabana Azmi, which is about as good as it’s possible to be. Bengali theatre personality Sohag Sen, as the maid with her sympathy spread over both husband and wife, is outstanding in a rare screen appearance. The Sanjoy-Raja Narayan Deb duo has invested the film with a rich musical score added with a number by the legendary baul singer, Lalon Phokir. But this is Ghosh’s film at its core. In 19th and 20th centuries, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. Only a small slew of Hollywood films about poets such as Bright Star (John Keats), Tom and Viv (T.S. Eliot), Sylvia (Sylvia Plath), Total Eclipse (Arthur Rimbaud), and Mrs. Parker and her Vicious Circle (Dorothy Parker) have met with moderate success. Indraneel’s genius as a poet is the fixed point around which Shob Charitro Kalponik orbits (Ghosh himself penned the verses and the screenplay). Ghosh, with his restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films poetry in the present tense, and his wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word. And while no film can
hope to take you inside the process by which poetry is made, Ghosh
allows you to hear them spoken aloud. You will want to stay until the
very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of
each gaffer and grip, but rather to savour every syllable of
recitation of another kobita, poem.
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