Sharmila Tagore and memories go back a long way. In Satyajit Ray’s Nayak, she shared Uttam Kumar’s reminiscences in an unforgettable journey. 59 years later, the incandescent Ms Tagore is back in a film about fade-proof memories and snapshots of a life well lived.
There is an unintended referential, reverential moment of nostalgia in writer-director Suman Ghosh’s Puratawn (The Ancient) where Indraneil Sengupta playing Sharmila Tagore’s son-in-law, urges her, “Gao na.”
He unknowingly echoes Rajesh Khanna two famous words in Shakti Samanta’s Amar Prem when Sharmila Tagore stops singing. I am not sure whether Sharmila actually sings for her daughter and son-in-law in Paratawn: the end credits start rolling and we just hear a voice singing of long-forgotten dreams and aches.
The line between the present and the past is effectually ebbed in Ghosh’s fragile gentle take on memory, its loss and tentative retrieval. Sharmila Tagore, in a role that seems to fit into her, rather than the other way around, is omnipresent, either physically or we have the other characters speaking about her.
Most clearly she is the epicentre of the delicately threaded plot. Her precarious mental condition—she is 80 and she might be suffering from Alzheimer’s or as her son-in-law suggests, futurephobia—doesn’t condition her physical grace at all. Sharmila Tagore ingrained elegance occupies every nook of this understated family drama.
There are no dramatic outbursts in Puratawn, not like the ones in Sharmila’s last celluloid outing Gulmohar where there were so many secrets and revelations, the film felt like a jigsaw.
This time she emerges far more restrained, reined-in. The camera loves her in every frame. Sadly, Rituparna Sengupta for all her personality-assuming celluloid skills, looks nothing like Ms Tagore’s daughter. There is a discernible disconnectedness between the two actresses. Providentially, the cleft never comes in the way of a smooth rapport between the onscreen mother and daughter.
And although couple played by Rituparna and Indraneil are on the verge of a breakup, Indraneil Sengupta, we are told repeatedly, shares an “independent” relationship with his screen mother-in-law. That relationship too is not given a chance to grow. In a running time of just over 90 minutes, writer-director Suman Ghosh squeezes in images of family fissures from a distant past, as well tensions in the present. The dramatic baggage becomes too much for the narration to bear. We are left with too many unanswered questions on the mother-daughter equation.
Some of the characters, such as the giggly maid (Brishti Roy) and the self-conscious psychiatrist (Ekavali) are painted in broad brush strokes which the film doesn’t warrant. As is the won’t in all remarkable works of art, it is the flaws that define the end product. After all, what would Sharmila Tagore be without those age-defining wrinkles?
