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iView Author: Ritwik Banerjee
(Ames, Iowa, United States)
EMAIL: ritwik4 [at] gmail [dot] com

Title: 15 Park Avenue- A Review

Aparna Sen, an iconoclast of sorts, has been making films questioning norms and perceptions of our society.15 Park Avenue is the continuation of that trend.

The story of the film revolves around Mithi, a schizophrenic, and the dynamics of her relationship with her half sister and also her one time fiancée, Jojo. Mithi’s obvious and inevitable fight with everyday life is perhaps only overshadowed by the fight of her sister- perhaps a more important fight, a more difficult one too. A fight against her own ambitions, against traditional irrationalities and perhaps more importantly a fight against her desires for a relationship. A relationship for life. The dormant seeds of schizophrenia in Mithi resurface after she was brutally gang raped while on one of her journalistic assignments. It brought a catastrophic change to the very psyche of Mithi. Her fiancée, Jojo parts with her conceding that he does not anymore feel the passion for her. All that’s left is a mere shade of pity.

11 Years later, as Providence will have it, Jojo a.k.a. Joydeep Roy finds Mithi wandering on the flank of a river in Bhutan. Now married with a couple of children , his plans for a quiet vacation goes awry as he is dragged towards Mithi by an inexplicable desire .Perhaps to rediscover the long broken chord with Mithi. Little did he know that the ties had severed for ever. Mithi now in a mature stage of schizophrenia doesn’t even recognize him as her Jojo but somehow takes him as a friend. A friend whom she begins to trust once again in life, a friend who had failed her once, a Friend—she believes will find for her , her very own 15 Park Avenue, where Jojo and her five children is waiting for her .That’s her alter ego – her hallucination. Joydeep for once vows not to fail her again. He promises her to help her find 15 Park Avenue- an address even he knew was a mere figment of Mithi’s imagination.

It goes without saying of course that the acting performances were brilliant. The powerful portrayal of a schizophrenic By Konkona , the intellectual yet considerate “didi” by Shabana Azmi and the brilliantly nuanced performance of Shefali Shetty playing the role of a flabbergasted wife of Joydeep Roy perhaps stood out of all.

I think what Aparna Sen tried to explore in the film was captured in one piece of dialogue delivered by Dhritiman Chattopadhyay, the psychiatrist, while conversing with Shabana over tea table. That’s when he says, “whose reality is more real?”- a rhetorical and profound question that. And eventually she herself provides an answer in the concluding scene. Her answer.

The concluding scene of the film, a limbo to many, is perhaps one of the strongest, poetic and more importantly cinematic concluding remarks among contemporary Indian Cinema. In search of 15 Park Avenue Mithi was suddenly lost in her delusional world. When we were all busy figuring out whether the Jojo and others actually found out Mithi or not, the saner ones had themselves started believing that there was a thing called 15 Park Avenue, a hitherto delusional address and actually started asking people around, “where is 15 park avenue?…not palm avenue …no no its not park road …its PARK AVENUE”.A stark departure from saner reality, giving way to anticipation of a mere delirium. Mithi did not disappear any where .The locality was small .She must have been somewhere around, lost in her delusional world …the others would have certainly found her out in a few minutes. What is more interesting perhaps is the transition of these “normal” characters into Mithi’s schizophrenic, fantasy world. The already obscure line, between the real and the unreal, according to the auteur, further gets blurred.

With these subtle concluding remarks she hits the very foundations of “reason” and the way we perceive it to be. The film reaches higher echelons of philosophy of reasoning here by trying to redefine rationality in its own terms , by asserting that its us, the saner ones who have imposed our dimensions of reason on the “insane”.

That brings me to another eminent Sen. Amartya Sen, in one of his seminal works on philosophy, argues that one’s objective assessment of an situation is determined by the virtue of the position that one is in. This, he calls, positional objectivity. What man perceives as shade of red is a mere shade of grey to a cow, for eg. Which is the true colour is perhaps a void question.

Our popular notion of perception precludes us from acknowledge positional objectivity as a possible reason for varying perceptions of reality. Reality to most of us is “absolute”. 15 Park Avenue challenges this very “absolute” notion of realityFor those who have followed Aparna Sen’s films chronologically, from Picnic to 15 Park Avenue , one will realize that her way of film making has undergone a sea change. Sen’s initial training in film making was under Satyajit Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta (her father) both doyens of neo-realistic cinema Today how ever their influence on Sen has waned. She has moved on to a more linear narrative structures of storytelling, nonetheless equally powerful.

Sen’s film as always has been a critically thought out and meticulously planned one, touching the audience at their very core. Whether it will be able to change the ways-of –thinking, deeply seated through centuries, or not only time will tell. But surely it will make many think, the way they have not. And perhaps that’s the beginning of an end.

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