CINEMA
A director's film
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In "Chokher Bali", Ghosh has tried to remain true to the Tagorean spirit, the zeitgeist-setting, and the medium, writes GOWRI RAMNARAYAN.
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ARUN CHATTOPADHYAY
Raima Sen in "Chokher Bali" ... makes the tangle credible.
THERE were mixed reports about how Rituparno Ghosh's most recent film "Chokher Bali"' (Bengali) was received in Locarno and Toronto this year. But there was no doubt at all about the excitement it generated at the International Film Festival of India, New Delhi. In Bengal too, the casting of Aishwarya Rai (as against the original choice Nandita Das) has played its part in making the film a box-office hit.
In a State where the same word (boi) stands for both book and film, it is not surprising that "Chokher Bali", based on Rabindranath Tagore's novel should quicken interest. But "Binodini" had satisfied neither readers, nor the author himself, who openly regretted its conclusion. For today's non-Bengali reader, the story of a lovely, forced-to-be-austere widow's cloying friendship with a girl of her age, her passion for the friend's husband — and husband's friend — may seem dated and sentimental, especially as the characters grab, kiss and weep over each other's feet at crucial moments.
However, the shifting triangles of attraction and repulsion can tantalise. They glide through interactions between the spoilt, greedy, selfish medical student Mahindra (Prasenjit Chatterjee), his doll's house bride Ashalata (Raima Sen), his self-righteous, self-denying, socio-political activist friend Behari (Toto Roychowdhury), and the beauteous orphan and young widow houseguest Binodini (Aishwarya Rai). The emotional fluctuations are more predictable between the women, as also between the men. The male-female links are less specific, and despite scenes of conjugal and illicit lovemaking, left more to our imagination. Characters grow and take shape before our eyes, revealing darker shades, even in wholesome Ashalata and noble Behari.
Easy to see why the book would attract a filmmaker. But remember how Satyajit Ray succeeded only partially in adapting Tagore's "Ghare Baire"?
In "Chokher Bali", Ghosh has tried to remain true to the Tagorean spirit, the zeitgeist setting (1900s), and the medium. His deep admiration for Tagore and Ray are obvious — Behari even looks like the young Rabi babu. The ghats of Benares, the flight of pigeons, the style of music, the use of opera glasses... are all tributes to Ray. The lighting captures the romance of lanterns and candles.
The camera does not transcend the straightforward, using television frames almost. Some crucial scenes are painted with such beauty that they lose their rawness. Known for his attention to minutiae, Ghosh clutters the indoor scenes with innumerable objets de art. They distract from the interplay of feelings. The European nude is an overdone symbol. Besides, Rai and Sen look too perfectly dressed to ring true. Longish voice over narration and exchanges of epistles are hard on subtitle-readers. Nor is there much contrast between the said and the shown. The background is a blur. The tides of rising nationalism and colonial unrest in Bengal refuse to come alive.
The filmmaker admits to departures from the text. What he does retain and admirably, are the complex emotions in the story, inhering in the metaphor "Chokher Bali", literally "sand in the eye". Inseparables at first, the girls playfully call each other by this phrase. Soon, they become irritants to each other, burdened by envy, fury, grief and revulsion. Binodini is inflamed by the thought that before her unfortunate marriage and widowhood, she had been proposed as a bride and rejected by both Mahindra and Behari, and Asha enjoys the bliss that could have rightfully been hers.
In his turn, Behari cannot forget that Asha was chosen to be his mate before Mahindra appropriated her for himself. Mahindra does not want Binodini to slip through his hands, nor can he tolerate Behari's attraction for wife Asha, or mistress Binodini. There are grainy undercurrents of Binodini's feelings for the "good" Behari. Like the transformation of sand into pearl, these relationships must mature through constant, intense, abrasive contact.
Though he looks too old to be a student, Prasenjit Chatterjee breathes a selfish sensuality. Roychowdhury is excellent; he grows in stature as he begins to understand himself, acknowledging "impurities", trying to rectify errors. Lily Chakrabarty evokes the strength and weakness of maternal blindness, not without humour. Raima Sen makes a wonderful simpleton whose beauty cannot save her from the sins of myopia, ineptness and weak will. It is she who makes the tangle credible. Aishwarya Rai flattens the psychological dimensions of repression and motivation. Paradoxically, the mileage from glamour comes at the cost of character.
The novel has some arresting moments going beyond themselves. As when poor Asha is unhappy that, despite the misery of separation from her beloved husband, her "silly body has put on weight"; or when Binodini pleads with Behari not to be "pure as driven snow always, but to be a little vile".
The film matches those undercurrents in its own way. In the bedroom, the white-robed widow demonstrates how to wear a crimson velvet jacket by putting it on herself. The wife will wear it when she enters the nuptial bed.
"Chokher Bali" follows a known path in story telling, but it is a director's film all the same. And Rituparno unfolds his boi without indulgence, with love, taste and empathy.
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