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Debutant Sanjoy Nag’s Memories In March opens a new window to the INDIAN cinema still shies away from portraying the gay identity. Some sections of a rather conservative audience that have stopped looking the other way when a bedroom scene happens on screen, still cannot take to lesbian and gay love. In this scenario, the commercial and critical success of Just Another Love Story throws up questions of acceptance. Close on the heels of this film, a new film in Hindi, Memories in March, is opening a new window into the social mindset of the third gender. The film portrays the behaviour, manner and attitude of a gay person in his interactions with the mainstream, blurring the lines that have till now distanced the sexual minority. Directed by debutant Sanjoy Nag and co-produced by Shree Venkatesh Films and Rituparno Ghosh, Memories in March is about Arti Mishra’s discovery of her son’s sexual orientation after his death in a car accident. The son, Siddharth, does not appear on screen once even through photographs or digital images on a camera or a cellphone. Yet, you can feel his strong presence right through the film. Deepti Naval plays the grieving mother, Rituparno Ghosh portrays Arnab, the dead son’s boss who, it turns out, is also his lover while Raima Sen plays Shahana, his colleague who was in love with him. "Unlike Abhiroop in Just Another Love Story, who was very open about his sexual preferences and did not bother to hide his relationship with Basu, his director (within the film), portrayed by Indraneil Sengupta, Siddharth in Memories in March is a cloistered gay. The film is about a mother’s shock on discovering this side of her son’s life over and above the grief she experiences from his sudden death. Yet, no one actually comes and tells his mother all this. Arnab, his lover, informs her through small, feather-light touches about her son’s alternative sexual preference," says Rituparno on whose original Bengali script Parapaar, the film is based. Death may not really mark the end of a mother-son relationship. This comes across in Memories in March when the mother, while trying to understand things about her son she did not know, forges a new bonding with both Arnab and Shahana (Raima Sen) by the time she leaves to go back from Calcutta to Delhi after four days. "Arnab and I have a rather unusual chemistry that spans our four-day long interaction," says Deepti Naval. It begins with me feeling very hostile towards this man who, I suspect of having sexually exploited my son by virtue of his superiority in the organisation. It was both easy and convenient for me to presume that my son had a relationship with Shahana, a woman. It was more acceptable than the shock of accepting something I was not used to especially when I thought I knew my son the best. Like all heterosexual mothers who cannot digest their children’s homosexuality, she gets into denial and then, slowly comes to terms with her son being a gay and even develops a strange bond with Arnab," Deepti sums up. "What begins with denial followed by anger goes through a process of confrontation. It finally leads to an acceptance of choices, of the human body, of relationships that create a ‘family’ away from the rigid concept of the ‘family’ as we know it. With acceptance is born a new bonding between the grieving mother and her dead son’s grieving friends, who, in a manner of speaking, knew her son more intimately than she did. For the first time, an Indian film is exploring spaces through the life and death of a homophobic protagonist. Also, for the first time in an Indian film, you get to know what a gay person’s life is all about away from his amorous life," says Ritu. "It was the story that appealed to me. There is an intriguing interplay of relationships. There is a kind of rivalry between Arnab and Shahana because both are in love with the same man. Shahana loses out to Arnab but this does not antagonise her towards Arnab or Siddhartha because there are other factors within a relationship too. I was also interested in the idea of ownership. The mother thinks that no one knows her son better than she does. It turns out she doesn’t and that there are others to share her memories of him when he is no longer around," says Sanjoy about his first film. The music track by Debjyoti Mishra is fascinating though there are no lip-synced songs in the film. The playback has been done by Kailash Kher, Shail Hada, Rekha Bharadwaj and Subhamita. The film is multilingual with a lot of English, Hindi and a generous smattering of Bengali. "The subtle ways in
which the mother learns about her son’s gay identity is beautiful.
There was a shot I had with Rituparno in Siddharth’s Mumbai flat.
Arnab is fetching the food from the kitchen, laying the table and then
serving the food. It was his way of telling me that he was more
familiar with my son’s apartment than I was. Why would he be so
familiar? After all, he was only my son’s boss, wasn’t he? In
another scene, I first enter my son’s flat in the dark. I do not
know where the light switches are so Arnab directs me through the
cellphone. I am looking for my husband’s US cell number and Arnab
tells me precisely where it is. Nowhere in the film is the
relationship articulated verbally. And that makes it all the more
emotionally moving that keeps haunting you long after pack-up
time," Deepti sums up.
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