Pushing the Bengali envelope

KOLKATA: Bengali films, and film-makers, have, over the years, created a sentimentalized prototype of love and romance which had a tenacity that outlived the popularity and iconicity of individual films.
From Pramathesh Barua’s ‘Devdas’ to the genre of Uttam-Suchitra films, they served up tearful romances which defined the very idea of love for successive generations of Bengalis.This was often a platonic love that was tied to sacrifice and tender emotions, but mostly also sorted out happy endings. It became the prototype and stereotype as well, something that we accepted as a part of being “Bengali”. This brand of love story was imprinted on the middle class “Bengali culture”.
This Bengali envelope gets pushed to a breaking point of sorts in Srijit Mukherjee’s latest film ‘Nirbaak’, which to my mind is his intellectually most profound film. It is a medley of four love stories, but where the love is nothing like the kind of love stories that we can identify with, or scope out very easily in our established mindsets. In the first of the four stories, a narcissist pleasures himself in bed and a tree has an orgasm watching a young woman sleeping under it, in another a dog is possessively in love with its owner and in the most unnerving but brilliant of the stories (with a splendid dose of dark humour), a young attender of dead bodies in a morgue falls in love with the frozen dead body of a woman, the same woman who links all four stories. These “loves” are not our normal or natural kinds of love — the story with the dead body for instance draws upon the theme of necrophilia — love of and pathological fascination for dead bodies, which in public discourse has been associated with some of the most startling crimes.
When a mainstream and successful Bengali film-maker chooses to experiment thus, it calls attention to some larger trends of contemporary filmmaking and our responses to them. ‘Nirbaak’ has not been kindly received by audiences or reviewers. One suspects that is because it pushed the said ‘Bengali’ envelope too hard, and far too far for any larger level of comfort. Even when Rituparno Ghosh came out as a gay film-maker and appeared in ‘Arekti Premer Galpo’ (or his own ‘Chitrangada’ for that matter) as a gay artist in love with another man, the sentimentality and lofty fabric of love remained true to our accustomed schema, and therefore much more acceptable to the urban middle-class moviegoer.
Acceptability for that matter is also constrained when a film-maker rearranges the Bengali universe of an iconic fictional character as iconic as Byomkesh Bakshi. Think of Dibakar Banerjee’s recent adaptation which was grudged by Bengali critics for not being close enough to creator Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s novels and their ethos of the neighbourhood “satyanweshi”.
Not debating the film’s merits or flaws (of which there were several, including an over-the-top dramatic ending) here, one thing stands out however, and links with it ‘Nirbaak’. It is that same resilience of the filmgoer and critic alike to push hard the envelope of the Bengali universe. Whether that links to the idealized Bengali notions of love or the time-warped world of Byomkesh, which in an contemporary adaptation, however, needs to transcend the threshold of Bengali nostalgia for it to even try and become a viable franchise. Which Dibakar Banerjee’s version, did, to some extent, with its pitching of Byomkesh and interwar Calcutta against a global canvas with the obvious aim of extending the brand beyond a home grown Bengali public.
The long and short of it — we have as a larger audience resisted the kind of scoping by film-makers which dents our more protected sensibility of ourselves as a “Bengali” public.
This kind of resistance is especially true with respect to the work of film-makers who are acclaimed and yet also popular, and who are expected to operate as signifiers of “our” universe, not transgress it.
The same resistance was evidenced in the case of Rituparno Ghosh when he “came out” as a gay film-maker after being lauded and feted as Satyajit Ray’s true inheritor, and most recently with Srijit Mukherjee or, in extended schema a Dibakar Banerjee.
By definition such film-makers are expected to reify our sense of “us” or “we”. Not as in a ‘Nirbaak’, where we get the sense that the absurd and abnormal also happens in the life of people “like us”.
(Sharmistha Gooptu is a film historian and author)