Ritwik Ghatak and Ajantrik
I was under the spotlight, and people generally behind the camera don’t really like the spotlight. Well OK, Hitchcock was an exception. The saleslady at the Music World in Calcutta’s College Street was breathing down my neck, asking me to “peek waan, saer” from a limited selection of ten or eleven Bangla DVD’s, so that we could pay, and release the five other impatient customers behind us. Apparently, they had a “buy one get one free” scheme on those select few DVD’s. Not having read Bangla in close to twenty years, I was fumbling through the titles, starting to sweat under the steady benevolence of the air conditioning. She suggested “Pratidwandi” (The Adversary) and “Seemabadha” (Company Limited), but I said I already had those. Then she said “Ajantrik” (The Pathetic Fallacy) and I jumped. “Eta Ritwik Ghataker na?”. She nodded and so did I. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the five customers sending up grateful prayers to the guy above.
‘Probashi Bangalis’ (non-resident Bengalis) have a terrible tendency to watch only Satyajit Ray to remind them of their roots. My family is no exception and soon I was worshiping the man, having seen all his work and even owning a few of his films on DVD. However, two more names kept popping up in the Western film books of the 60’s and 70’s – Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. I had watched Sen’s “Akaler Sandhane” (In the Search for Famine?) with Smita Patil and liked it, but was wary of the other name, especially after Agastya Sen, the protagonist of my favorite novel English August, had panned him as being considered good only after the French had praised his work. Also, I had never had the opportunity to watch any of his films.
So, I watched Ajantrik the other day. It was a little slow initially despite the slapstick, and the terrible sound quality of the DVD didn’t help, but by the end of the film, I had liked it. It is an existential film about an over-possessive taxi driver Bimal and his beloved Chevy ‘Jaggadal’, that has a life of its own – getting jealous when Bimal gives rides to beautiful single women. The car is really old (one of the doors always keeps falling out) and the other taxi drivers mock the thick-skinned Bimal for sticking to his old piece of crap, that passengers choose only when they have no other choice, or don’t know any better. The DVD cover carelessly characterizes it as a comedy. Slapstick, yes, but is the whole film really just a comedy?
I feel the car represents the elderly and tradition in the film, and our increasing tendency to turn away from our elders and traditional practices. The protagonist is named ‘Bimal’, possibly after Bimal Roy (whom Ghatak was close to), famous for bringing realism into Hindi cinema. The number plate of the car is BRO 117. Bengali for ‘old’ is ‘buro’. 117 adds up to 9, which is the biggest one-digit number. Towards the end of the film, Bimal, who is frustrated by everyone asking him to sell Jaggadal as scrap metal, finds solace in the visually stimulating Jhau dance of the tribals – another traditional art form that is being completely forgotten.
Kali Bannerjee is good as the loyal Bimal, who smokes and skips dinner to pay for new parts for Jaggadal. My funniest scene is the one where a fellow Sardarji taxi driver is singing a high tempo Punjabi song next to Bimal and Jagaddal and not to be undone, Bimal strikes up an even more fervent Bangla song with more force and completely off key. I don’t know if it is an actual song, because it sounded very unBangla like. His expressions are priceless in the scene where he dolls himself up in a rin-safedi wallah white dhoti-kurta and a very bhadralok middle-parting. Ghatak’s direction is novel, whether it is the innovative playing with the focus when a couple of passengers are having a hard time in the car, or the beautifully intimate wide shots (despite the contradiction) of Bimal and Jaggadal. As the film spirals towards a fatal end, you are bracing yourself for a bleak ending, and then like a magician Ghatak produces this beautiful ending sequence that has no dialog but says it all – one must move on in life.
Impressed with the film, I decided to research Ghatak online. I came across this extensive interview here.
It is a sad yet beautiful read, because he seemed like a washed-up Communist, sad at the state of affairs in the country at the time; sad that communism had somewhere down the line transformed itself from an intellectual philosophy to a violent one. His taste in literature and film was also extremely refined, probably too ahead of it’s time. His straightforwardness reminded me of blog posts of Anurag Kashyap. It was interesting to read about his praise for the technique in a Nazi documentary filmmaker and for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin at the same time, saying that one doesn’t have to identify with the content to appreciate the technical prowess. Personally, I consider Battleship Potemkin a propaganda film, but love it for its technical genius, especially the razor sharp editing. While I haven’t his other films like “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (Cloud Covered Star?”) and “Jukti, Takko aar Gappo” (Theory, Argument and Stories?), the man seemed like an optimist from the interview, expressing his hope to see young filmmakers succeed. I think he would have been happy today that at least Bollywood is progressing in the right direction.
Tags: Ajantrik, Ritwik Ghatak
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
Ghatak, the real master… We all carry our ‘Jaggadal’s’ with us…will we ever have the courage that Bimal had to do away with our attachments to things human, machine and even thoughts…
Ajantrik is a film that can be extrapolated to any level of human existance, that is what a master work is…only Ghatak can do it..
arSENik, loved your impromptu Bimal and 117… :-) The film, through a comic device in most parts of narration, hides a layer of frustration and inability to change things… masterpiece.. I loved it even better than the celebrated and wonderful ‘Megha Dakhe Tara’ and ‘Subarnorekha’…
Yeah, we all carry our ‘Jaggadal’s with us — a heavy stone which we can’t get rid off as much as we want. And look how breezily Ritwik portrayed that.
Arsenik here’s wishing that u soon get 2 c Komal Gandhar, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, Jukti Tokko R Goppo and Titas Ekti Nodir Naam.
Thanks. You alluded to something I forgot to mention. I sensed this haphazardness in the film, which is basically Bimal’s state of mind, and represents the frustration you talked about.
Megha dhaka tara was the first film of ghatak I watched and Its climax hanuted me for days!!.
Real master!!
I have made umpteen attempts to finish Pather Panchali but failed always. Couldnt like it and it puts me off in between. dont know why. My fav Ray film is Charulata and Agantuk !!
I don’t want this to turn into a Ray discussion, but PP also isn’t my favorite Ray film. I think its technically great (I have my own theory as to why it is the most popular Ray film in the West, but I won’t get into that here), just like Charulata, but the content for both films doesn’t appeal to me much. My favorite Ray films are those in the Calcutta Trilogy – Jana Aranya (The Middleman), Pratidwandi and Seemabadha, and yes, in that order.
I completely agree with u man..this post is about Ritwik gahtak.Ray is not allowed here.
Hey boss,I salute u for writing about great Ritwik Ghatak.He was a real genius film maker who never made cinema for any commerical purpose.Please watch his ‘Meghe Dekhe Tara’,i think it’s one of the greatest film of all time..and also ‘Komal Gandhar’, a real gem.
Ajantrik was also my first Ghatak film…audio & video quality were very poor…still it was an awesome experience…the way the car was personified…it was far ahead of its time…