Flashback – London Film Festival(2005)

PROJEKT iVIEW | Movies | October 5, 2006 at 2:04 am

Many firsts for me here…

Attending a film festival, watching a full-fledged Bengali film in a cinema, writing a first review for a non-Hindi/non-English film and a tad feeling of an outsider amongst native Bengali crowd… phew!

Since last two years I’ve been missing on a chance to attend LFF, this year again didn’t want to miss it so kept a good watch on dates, venues, films etc. I was so much looking fwd to watching 15 Park Avenue (Aparna Sen) & Antarmahal (Ritupurno Ghosh) along with many other English movies + some others from world cinema (French/Iran/Japan/Chinese etc). But watching so many movies is not practical and I can easily give a miss to English movies here as they usually get released in theatres soon after the festival or DVDs later and some of the world cinema is available on Amazon too.

Unfortunately couldn’t get tickets for both these movies (I underestimated the number of people who would want to catch these movies) but did manage to watch this one:

Nishijapon (After the Night…Dawn)
Screenplay, music & directed by Sandip Ray (son of Satyajit Ray)
Location: Kalimpong, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
Language: Bengali
Cast: Sabyasachi Chakravarthy (Nirmal), Soumitra Chatterjee (Bimal Das)
Dipankar Dey (Brojen Lahiri), Rituparna Sengupta (Anita), Raima Sen (Sunita)
Parambrata Chatterjee (Shyamal)

It’s about a family who gets alienated in a mountain forest villa after an earthquake for few days. In difficult times the true nature of each character begins to reveal. The burning off the civilised mask of people can be gruesome. But surviving through an ordeal can result in fathoming personal realisation and reaching new heights.

The film is beautifully shot; the silent, serene mountains have an enigmatic calling feel about them that is hard to resist. Its an out-and-out art house film with very minimal characters, dialogues, pace, set-up etc. The cast bring small touches to the characters that make them intriguing. The director maintains a nice observational tone that warmly expresses the characters and situations, centring on the dry wit and snappy interaction until things get much more serious. And even in the midst of calamity, there are moments of humour, tenderness, bravery and selflessness that feel earthy and real, never forced.

Thanks to English subtitles that offset my language setback. But there were a few times where I wanted to say, “yes, next please!” Maybe, this can be blamed on the attitude that most of us have developed over the years by run of the mill films we feast on; yet overall it didn’t disappoint me a bit. I think its a must see for all those who still believe that a good film can survive without any commercial packaging, but the downside being that such films get limited only to festival circuits and its audience.