Dosar – Ode to the Companions!
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Why is it that we look for a companion? Why is it that we do not understand loneliness? Why is marriage a very unpretentious relationship? Why does this relationship not brook any space for lies, self-seeking, myopia or alternate love, if there was any such term for extra marital relationships?
Dosar (2006, Bengali, Planman Pictures, Rituparno Ghosh) decides to delve into the grey of this relationship with great aplomb. Marriage does not limit a person here. It provides space, careers, happiness, wisdom, grace and security. But the man chooses to axe all of this down with an alternate relationship with an office colleague over stolen weekends in resorts and hill stations. Such choices don’t last, not forever; here the other woman dies in the accident they both undergo, as they come back from another stolen weekend, from stained bed sheets, from guilt, from small moments of comfort, in arms, of each other.
Your lips met mine,
It is not about the kiss,
Unsure about the future beyond,
The lips seek shelter here.
So is a text message from the other woman in a retrieved mobile phone. The wife has a shattered world all around her. A husband in ICU, the news all over the channels, the office mates unwilling to tell her much, her friends there for her but unsure of what they can offer her at such times except shadows. She curtains her surroundings, tries to dig into her misery for solace, does not find much there and thence decides to walk out of the relationship. But, with a partner in ICU? Middle class India does not allow that, does it? While it bitches about the circumstances that led to this accident, it has no answer to a death and the subsequent loss of a mother by a innocent 8 year old, it has no answer for a question posed by a bereaved husband who did not know about his wife’s dalliance – Whom do I get angry with? Yes, really where is that dust bin where one can dump pent up feelings, losses, anger and insecurities that plague modern day relationships?
The wife’s friends are also in a doomed relationship but lend a kind of a catharsis that she would have otherwise not experienced, by her understanding of their dark world, her counseling, even in her abused circumstances. She visits the bereaved husband to find him clammed up and desolate. In the beginning she hurts the man as she is repelled by what he has done, but then his desolation afflicts her maternal soul and she relents. It dawns onto her that there are people around who have it even more badly. Her husband in the meanwhile is back home. He is aware of the wife’s disgust. He repents, yet loves the departed soul. His bed ridden self reaches out again, for comfort, for light and understanding. Who else, but the wife again…..
Ghosh delivers this beautiful ode to companions in Black & White. His understanding of mood and shade have always been stupendous. Here, he goes a step forward and creates frames that actually lend a texture to the scene being told on screen by using the angle of the shot, the shadows created, the conversation, the eye movements of the actors, one or two props in the frame and in one case, depicting overpowering gloom by just asking the door to be shut as the scene unfolded in the man’s bedroom.
Sample a scene –
Interior of a bedroom. The man hobbles into it; from dark to a lit room. He throws his crutch onto the bed. He says that he wants to talk to his wife. The wife is unrelenting. She says that he does not have much to talk about with her. She is circling the bed, picking and settling clothes, while her eyes alternatively assess him and concentrate on the work at hand. The conversation is stilted. One gets the measure of their discomfort with each other.
Then the swing comes. The man wants to sleep in the room. The wife is dismissive about his request. He persists. She looks at him searchingly. The camera is on her as she is unsure of what needs to be done. The man petulantly settles into the bed. The door adjacent is ajar to the darkness in the other room. He settles just below the lamp, the hope of redemption. She sits in a chair beside the bed. A straight-backed contraption that does not allow her comfort, still cocooned in her tryst with hate. The man reaches out with his hand and slowly uncurls the fingers, of stigma, of disgust and of hate. He pulls her in from the shadows to light near him. The Cut!
Next, she is crying copiously in full glare of the bedside lamp while he breathing easy in relief in the soft grey beyond her.
“The lips seek shelter, again”
All this is achieved from precise prop arrangement, actor direction, precise screenplay and kick ass lighting. Oh, and practically no budget as one could decipher, in the production of that scene.
Ghosh proved with his first film, Unishe April, that actors are willing to stand up and deliver his typically introspective relationship dramas, with the kind of homework he comes with to his set. I lay accent on the word “homework” as he is reputed to shoot quite fast. Also, his understanding of women, lend a cadence to his dramas that few other contemporary directors can achieve. I cannot think of anyone else other than Adoor Gopalkrishnan. I delight in his ability to empower his lady characters with emotions and expressions that exploit the Navrasas to the hilt. Also, he is smart enough to get actresses like Konkona Sen Sharma or Shefali Shah to act in his movies at most times and they are the best we have in India, no question!
Konkona Sen Sharma plays the wife here. Possibly, this is the closest to her mother Aparna Sen’s persona of a strong willed woman, played in yester year films of note. She dives into the character with gusto. Ghosh uses her extremely mobile face to startling effect right through the film. There is a scene in this film where in she is with the other woman’s husband and is unable to make conversation as he has clammed up completely. She alternates between small sips of water from a glass kept at a distance, looking at him, at the walls and turning around behind her to watch the young son perched at the dining table. She just uses her eyes and hands, as she is seated and cannot act with her rest of the body. It is a long sequence and Konkona excels, keeping the viewer’s interest alive with the pregnant thought that she might blurt out something very offensive, or the other man might burst out in anger. Pent up scene, restrained, simple camera work static at one spot but brilliantly executed. If you thought Wake Up Sid or Omkara used her acting chops, watch this, you’d be amazed.
Prasenjit Chatterjee is an excellent actor. In the most inane Bengali potboilers he has been able to sustain viewer interest and here there is more to do. In recent years, Ghosh has been able to extract good work out of Chatterjee. But here, amongst other things, the character of the man was stuck in a bed for almost the whole film and had to wear a desolate expression through the film, with bandages all over. Despite these obvious props, he has been able to pull off the essence of a grieving and repentant guy very nicely. If one asks, what would be the expression of a repentant guy, what would be an answer – a hangdog expression??
Chatterjee just does it through his eyes and parched lips, though his coughing seemed a little contrived. His eyes have been an asset through his years as an actor and I have always felt that the actor with the most expressive eyes have been the most successful in Indian cinema. Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Pran, Rekha, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Govinda, Salman Khan, ShahRukh Khan, Mohanlal, Smita Patil, Kishore Kumar, Madhubala, Rajesh Khanna, Uttam Kumar, Sanjeev Kumar and now Hrithik Roshan and Madhavan.
The two lead actors are ably supported by Shankar Chakraborty as the bereaved husband, Pallavi Chatterjee and Parambrata as the wife’s friends and feuding lovers, Tota Roy Chowdhury in a small appearance as the man’s office mate and Saswata Chatterjee, in a fine cameo, as the man’s brother.
The music and the sound design punctuated by Sujata’s poetry is awesome, silence being used to great effect in many scenes.
Alas, this is a film from 2006, and in my quest to write about Bangla cinema, I have to dive back into the past and again prop up Ritu’s films!!
Tags: Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Dosar, Hrithik Roshan, konkona sen sharma, Madhavan, Pallavi Chatterjee, Parambrata, Planman Pictures, Prasenjit Chatterjee, Rituparno Ghosh, Saswata Chatterjee, Shankar Chakraborty, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Unishe April
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Indraneel da,
Good piece. Can we have some on the exquisite Titli,the Agatha Christie inspired Shubh Mohurot,or even the much maligned AntarMahal?
Also-you forgot to mention that Unishe April owes much to 1979’s Autumn Sonata.
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Men cheat because they know its easier to get forgiveness than permission
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Had a stupendous and haunting piano piece…truly world class.
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@Manoj – Titli and Shubhomuhurat need time to be written about, I shall attempt them, time permitting.
@Ajay – Ohhh..you registered that, Kudos! Very few people I know did register that, and that Rabindra Sangeet ensemble just before the accident…fab!
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Need to watch a lot of such meaningful & tasteful Bangla Cinema….Indraneel please recommend…
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RP Ghosh is definitely one of the best directors in India.. Unishe April, Choker Bali, Antarmahal, Bariwali are few of his films I have seen and he is yet to dissappoint me.. Will catch Dosar soon.. When I was in Kolkata in the early half of this decade, people used to make fun of the star Prasenjit as an actor.. but RP Ghosh’s film earned my respect for him as well…
Any meaningful film maker has always realized the impact of the feminine and her immense strength in our society.. Yes Adoor is one amongst them.. there were many directors in Malayalam and Tamil who built their narrative around strong female characters.. MT, Bharathan, Padmarajan, K Balachander, Mohan, KG George were a few of them….
Rituparno Ghosh is the custodian of a rich Bengali legacy and is carrying the responsibility beautifully.. am always game for any of his work…
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Someone send Ram the a DVD of the soggy ‘Raincoat’ please. Or send him the transcript of Rituparno’s despisable grilling of the affable Meer on his ‘Ghosh and Company’ to fully understand what the man(if we can call him that) truely stands for.Custodian indeed!
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Very well written. Can’t wait to watch it. I have an affinity for B&W anyway. It sounded as if silence was used like darkness for the film. If so, that’s simply brilliant.
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