Laptop (Kaushik Ganguly, 2012)

Laptop, written and directed by Kaushik Ganguly, is an odd film. It is not a remotely great film. It is a bad film. It is thematically untenable, ethically ambiguous and condescending, technically ill conceived, and art-wise artsy. Period. There are four stories in the film that have been transplanted from various echelons of the modern day Bengali society and the stories are made to cross over with each other with the intervention of a stolen laptop, a symbol of emotional connectedness among characters and vacuity thereof. Lets start with the narrative. A laptop, a trove of confidential medical information belonged to the owner of an infertility clinic, is stolen by a taxi driver to pay for his wife's treatment at the clinic. The driver concocts a story and sells the laptop to a hotel manager, a languishing father who works in a dingy, musty low-scale hotel so that he can afford his engineer son a laptop. The boy discovers on the hard drive of the laptop a number of pictures of a good looking girl who is the daughter of the infertility clinic's owner. The boy chases the girl's car, traces the physical address of the girl, and is finally appointed as the computer teacher for the girl. They instantly develop a liking for each other.But the girl discover's the stolen laptop at the boy's house and dumps him (and her own bike for apparently no rhyme and reason). The laptop then travels to a visually challenged author (and his typist), as a debt-clearing-device by the manager, who resides in the house owned by the author. Subsequently, the machine ends in the hands of a divorced publisher, who is in search of the kid born as a result of his sperm donation. As the laptop traverses, it touches lives only to change them in some inexplicable ways. I have hardly known a “good” film that works with a bad script. The problem is that this film loses focus when it centers on lesser-written tales, which Ganguly does not make better, and on some tales which he actually makes worse. The director has little regard for character development. So we never know why a particular character engages in an immoral act. For example, we are not shown what causes the driver to engage in an unethical activity. Is he intrinsically immoral, unethical? There is zero information. The character of the driver comes and goes with the blink of an eye. Consider the character of visually challenged author, the most righteous and saintly figure in the film. Despite knowing the background tales about the laptop, he suffers from no moral scruple when accepting the laptop from his renter. The manager’s character also displays the same nonchalant sentiment towards a laptop, which has been supposedly left behind by an amnesic passenger. The manager reveals to his family that the laptop was mistakenly left behind a forgetful passenger in the taxi. But being a typical middle-class family, they decide to ignore the episode and the film jumps forward. These characters come from various socio-economic classes and all of them exhibit the same apathetic behavior toward the stolen laptop; accept without any compunction. Ahem! So, in a nutshell, as if, the whole gamut human species have submitted to complete moral corruption. That is just to difficult to swallow even if one hails from the most corrupt nation from the earth. But, Ganguly marches on because the laptop is the driving force of the plot. There are also a few other minuses there. The film fails to devote enough screenspace to characters that occupy central roles and, erroneously focus attention to plot points or characters that disappear without no apparent rhyme and reason. For example, the character of the divorced publisher occupies the last 20-30 minutes of the film, but we have no clue to his psychological dilemmas, pains, and aspirations. As a result, we are never emotionally invested in the character. On the other hand, the director spends considerable amount of footage on the understated chemistry between the visually-challenged author and his typist, but the whole episode ends with no major dramatic culminations. The same frustration grips us with the story of the young boy and girl or the hotel manager. They end too abruptly. It seems that the director was trying to connect stories that are apparently disconnected and one story lends its way another by the way of a laptop. Ganguly fails miserably on this front as well as the transition from one to another is either too haste or too sporadic for a cohesive plot. In this connection, an exemplary film that pulls it of gracefully is Jafar Panahi’s The Circle. Another minus is the film’s lack of cohesiveness. Some scenes are juxtaposed with one another to evoke emotional responses, but their placement is too arbitrary in nature, which can be attributed to bad editing. The music is suitable for the mood of the film. The camera movements are slow, in keeping with the underlying sensibility of the film. But Ganguly must know that slow-moving camera and heart-wrenching music are not the only property of a good film. That way a film can be artsy, but no further it can progress. Actors have very little scope to perform. Bose is artifical or does not know what to do. Ganguly’s character is too self-congratulatory, the actor playing the role of the wife of the tea estate couldn’t touch the nerve of her character. She is the weakest link in the film. The climax is utterly ridiculous. Overall, this is a Laptop that performs its best when untouched.

Baishey Shravana (Mrinal Sen, 1960)

Baishey Shravana can be succinctly summarized by the following Japanese haiku:


The man was no villain.
The woman was all grace.
It was a cruel time.


Baishey Shravana  literally means the twenty-second day of the Bengali calendar month of Shravana.Baishey Shravana  in Sen's film merely happens to be the wedding day of an ill-fated couple, the man too old, the wife too young, the man almost uncouth to look at, the wife charming and aristocratic, both struggling to adjust with each other in their own way. Abject poverty in the face of a famine, and a desperate attempt to cling to their last glory lead to the wife's suicide on their wedding anniversary. In their life and death, Rabindranath Tagore, who was born on this date, was of no relevance. The film is based on poverty, famine, death, and a total erosion of human values. Nothing could have been more un-Tagorean!This is Mrinal Sen's cruellest film. We have seen anger, unrest, deprivation, and many other negative passions in his films, but in no other film are we faced with such oppressive, almost claustrophobic, atmosphere. In Baishey Shravana  there is no redemption, no compassion. The famine enters silently, and one must give credit to Sen that he never shows the famine physically. Just as he had established the war with the shot of a passing convoy and a flying aeroplane, he conveys the famine in the film by one long shot - villagers moving to the city in search of food. The important message of the film is that how poverty can rob a man of his last vestige of humanity, and bring him down to the level of a beast. Sen also took great care to ensure that the memory of Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray should not eclipse his film. Ray's camera had painted on celluloid the absorbing beauty of Bengal's countryside; Sen chose to focus only on the faces of the villagers - no tree, no river, not even a flower diverted his attention. Baishey Shravana  went to London and Venice festivals and earned rave reviews. However, the cruelty and the sense of doom of the film were intolerable for the audience at home as they were not prepared for the turn of the horrific events by the director. In Baishey Shravana,  Sen was making a human document and he mostly succeeded in his pursuit. 

Oka Oori Katha (The Marginal Ones) (Mrinal Sen, 1977)

Loosely based on Indian writer Premchandra's "Kafan", eminent Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen presents Oka Oori Katha. The story opens in a small village in Andhra Pradesh, a state of India. The story initially revolves around two male characters, a father (Venkayya) and a son (Kista), who are landless and vagrants.Venkayya has a strange philosophy about life: not to indulge in any type of work. He and his forefathers are being subjected to much exploitation by the landlord-class, which has forced him to conclude that life is an unending cycle of exploitation and he will be better off by not working anymore for anybody and that way he will not contribute further to the prosperity of the landlord-class. Kista indisputably adopts his father's principle and pursues vagrancy. For survival they steal and occasionally participate in manually demanding part-time labor the earnings from which are usually spent by the duo over binge drinking. Sen constructs the character of Venkayya to make him look like an iconoclast who defies all social norms, although, Venkayya is not a rebel in the traditional sense. He snivels before the landlord for a free meal and makes caustic comments about the landlord only when he is drunk. In essence, Venkayya's anger manifests in a total rejection of the system and has reduced him to a beast. However, his idea of self-respect seems to be at odds with his moral preferences. Midway in the film and Kista decides to marry Nilamma, a local girl, against his father's repeted warnings. Venkayya advises that marriage would require Kista to work, which would in turn undermine the long-standing principle of Venkayya. Nilamma is soon impregnated by Kista, and despite the demands of the situation, the duo does nothing but lives off the woman. Hard labor, deprivation, and lack of nutrition finally bring Nilamma down, and with no treatment around, she inches her way to death. Despite Nilamma's indescribable sufferings throughout the night, the duo is unmoved and sleeps in the courtyard, and doesn't bother about the occasional screams of the woman. The next morning, they find her dead. Although they have spent nothing on her during her lifetime, they decide to offer her a fitting funeral for which they set out to beg and the upper-class people contribute. Sen brings Venkayya under a tree in the final scene, who clutches the money in his hands and goes on demanding food, clothes, house, and finally Nilamma's life. The camera in the final shot zooms in on Nilamma's face that bursts into flames - a representation of Venkayya's anger. The anger of the oppressed directed towards the oppressors. Aficionados of Sen's films will be least surprised by the subject matter of Oka Oori Katha. Lending cinematic voices to the oppressed is one of the prime features of many of Sen's films. The first forty minutes of the film is a hard slog though as Sen's attempts to establish the two central male characters and their surroundings seem unfocused at times, which could have been handled with strict editing. However, after the introduction of Nilamma, the film gained required momentum in the department of drama and conflicts among the characters became acute. The film analyzes nature of the relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed from two standpoints: the landowner and the landless, and man and woman. Landowners perpetually turn their backs to marginal farmers/laborers, deprive them of their just and fair shares, and eventually push them towards starvation and death. However, they are atypically generous and dutiful to the people from the same class when it comes to donating money for the last religious rites. Similar relationship-parallels hold between Venkayya and Nilamma. Nilamma, when alive, was ignored and taken advantage of, was denied her rights in the household, and ultimately was pushed to death by Venkayya. Is this because she was a woman or does this outcome obtain due to Venkayya's firm belief in his philosophy about the duty of the working class in an atmosphere replete with inequality and deprivation? Can strange principles of Venkayya be so strong so as to overcome his compassion for family members? If so, then doesn't he indirectly lose to the landlord-class by sacrificing a human life?  The film doesn't attempt to disentangle these aspects, which is rather unfortunate. Despite these shortcoming, Oka Oori Katha is one of Sen's acclaimed works that deserves multiple viewings.


The film won a Special Prize of the Jury at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1977.

Bhooter Bhabishyat (The Future of The Past) (Anik Dutta, 2012)

In recent times, Indian and in particular Bengali media (in the state of West Bengal, India) are unjustifiably generous when it comes to heaving accolades on the current generation of Bengali filmmakers. This surplus of praise is mostly indefensible as recent Bengali films are still imprisoned by their strange obsession with relationship centric dramas. Exploring relation-based dramas, however, is not the main problem. The problem lies in elsewhere. Most of these cinematic efforts can mostly be characterized by the following undesirable elements: characters that are outside the bounds of possibility, only scratching the surface of emotional layers without much regard for deep character analysis (a lesson in this regard would be to watch, for example, the highly acclaimed Iranian film A Separation by Asghar Farhadi), lack of sensible dialogues, strong desire to pose as an "intelligent" filmmaker who is up-to-date with the world cinema (read literally stealing from these films; an example would be the much-hyped Bengali film Autograph), choosing style over substance, underappreciation for aural instruments of a film (Ritwik Ghatak was a pioneer for using sound brilliantly), sometimes unconvincing and archaic plots (when plots are convincing they are marred by some of the other factors mentioned here), and sheer inability to build up narratives that do not satisfy two important criteria of narrative cinema: credibility and coherence. Although, these films are technically much superior than their 1990s and last decade counterparts. Bhooter Bhabishyat avoids just about all of the above pitfalls. 

The story is exceptionally imaginative and yet simple. A gang of eclectic ghosts (a cook, a Bengali music band member, a Zamindar aka landlord, a representative of the East India Company, a refugee from Bangladesh,  a Bengali theatre actress, a revolutionary from 70s' Calcutta, a Rickshaw puller, and a few others) need help as they are about to be evicted from their current home as a businessman is all geared up to make way for malls and multiplexes.In the backdrop of this, an aspiring director steps in the same old mansion (where these ghosts are housed) for checking the site of an about-to-be-made film. What follows is a burst of activities replete with spoofs, puns, songs, and dance. Although, beneath all these lies a satirical message about the greed of the modern society that spreads its gluttonous wings at the expense of rich sculptural heritage of cities. The first time helmer Dutta is a master storyteller. Humorous and sharp dialogues (although being an ad filmmaker himself, Dutta couldn't escape the usual knack of an ad-maker for inserting punchlines after every two lines of dialogue), first-class camerawork, unforgiving editing, clever montage of sound pieces, keen eye for details, credible reproductions of a bygone age and society, idiosyncrasies of ghostly creatures - everything seem to jell for the film. Dutta heavily borrows from the master director Satyajit Ray's works and he is not at all reticent about this. In fact, when the aspiring filmmaker and the narrator of the ghosts' lives converse to build up the suspense, their performances strongly remind us of the interactions between the famous Bengali detective Feluda and his assistant Topshe. Delivery of some of the dialogues in the film that rhyme with each other is reminiscent of the lyrical exchanges from Heerak Rajar Deshe ( The Kingdom of Diamonds). In many other aspects, the film is replete with references from Ray's films. In fact, Dutta pays a grand tribute to Ray in this film. Overall, Bhooter Bhabishyat is a rare combination of ingenious plot idea, almost flawless execution, skillful exploitation of the medium as an art form, and an eye for commercial success - a combination that is visibly absent in most of the recent Bengali films.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (Kundan Shah, 1983)

A rare gem in the history of Hindi cinema.  Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is a dark comedy from an expert filmmaker Kundan Shah. Vinod (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir (Ravi Baswani) are two friends who want to start-up their own photo studio. The business prospects seem grim and gloomy for them when they are approached by Shobha (Barve), editor of a newspaper named “Khabardaar”. While both of them are equally besotted with Shobha, she exploits their feelings and assigns them the task of spying Police commisioner D’Mello (Satish Shah) and property builder Tarneja (Pankaj Kapoor). D’Mello and Tarneja are involved in an illegal deal. The photographer-cum-spy duo sense a massive web of corruption and bribery the ultimate goal of which is to win the tender for building a flyover in the city of Bombay. While spying, Sudhir and Vinod uncover a murder but remain in dark about the identity of the killer. They manage to recover the corpse as evidence, but eventually lose it. What follows is a long-drawn-out chase with the bad guys that meanders into the oddest of places. This is a crisp and well-directed film that has an excellent cast. Baswani and Shah with their comedic acumen and clodhopping adventures make the silver screen burst into a laughter riot. Pankaj Kapoor, Satish shah and Om Puri adequately represent the bad guys withe their particular idiosyncrasies. Bhakti Barve registers  a sharp performance as the shrewd Shobaji. The movie doesn’t have songs, a trademark of bollywood, except for maybe the hummable “Hum honge kaamyaab”. As a viewer one must be struck by the frankness and naiveté of the images. There is no attempt to intellectualise the comedy. The burden of humor entirely rests on disbelief. As an instance, there is a hilarious scene involving a dead body in a burqa amidst a sea of burqa-clad women. And of course the Mahabharata (The great Indian epic) episode which entailed a delightful spoof of the Ram Lilas we have all seen at some point in our lives. And yet the whole episode never caused any outrage. May be this is a special quality of the film itself – its nonchalant and innocent attitude allowed it to take on both holy cows and ugly underbellies of cosmopolitan India.

Ultimately, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is at the heart about the loss of innocence and the breaking of ideals. At the end of the day, in the film, cynicism over idealism and the collective dishonesty triumph over the individual honesty. The two main characters  expose the builder-politician-journalist mafia in all its ugliness, such a contemporary theme in today's India. Beneath its foamy and frivolous exterior lies the real and sad truths of life. The movie ends with Vinod and Sudhir walking out of jail, still in their striped jail pajamas. In the backdrop the spirited anthem, Hum honge kaamyab, hum honge kaamyab ek din, plays mournfully, may be hinting at hope. For the uninitiated, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro can best be described as a breathless satire of cosmopolitan India.

Ghatashraddha (Girish Kasaravalli, 1979)

This is a Kannada language (the language mainly spoken in the state of Karnataka, India) film made by the renowned filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli hailing from the same state. The film is set in a remote village in the state in 1920; a traditionalist rural society  where women are forcefully downtrodden. The story revolves around two characters: a little boy named Ajit who comes to attend a local school run by a village scholar and the widowed young daughter of the scholar named Meena. The narrative of the film unfolds from the boy's perspective. The dainty girl falls prey to the carnal desires of a teacher from the school and is ultimately impregnated. While the girl is still alive, the father excommunicates the girl to avoid social condemnation by performing funeral rites known as Ghatashraddha . The local school shuts down after this soul stirring incident and the boy is forced to go back home. Kasaravalli slowly depicts the stifling social realities of the time  by drawing our attention to an array of religious and social practices that seem to perpetuate the interests of the ruling class (the Brahmins aka Hindu priests) and sufferings of the persecuted. The scenes where the male teachers coach the sacred hymns and the male children learn them by rote portray a perpetuation of patriarchy and instruments of maintaing social powers in the hands of a chosen few. Ajit fails to learn the hymns and becomes an outcast in the school. Analogously, Meena becomes pregnant out of wedlock and immediately becomes a social outcast. The two outcasts together accentuate the rigid social fabrics and the conditions of the people who dare to undermine the righteousness of the system. Kasaravalli's command of black and white images is unparalleled. Ghatashraddha is definitely an important social document and a gem in the New Wave of Kannada film history.