Musing on Sunday about Last Night's Film
Waking up on my own time, for it is a Sunday. The Delhi heat has been incredibly harsh, and it has left the people inside their rooms. I am waking up to a sweat I built up after the sun is already up. I am not thinking about anything particularly today. I am now thinking about how to post this on a blog, but I am not concerned about that anymore. Public perception of the writing for me has two facets. On one hand, if someone I know who reads immensely tells me the writing is good, I feel proud and giddy. On the one hand, multiple non-readers who have been friends and have been reading what I write for a while tell me I have regressed. I don’t heed their advice much. Any writing, for that matter, is entirely dynamic, and it has to go through the fire all the time. The fluff that exists even in what I write right now must not exist later.
Thinking of Chokher Bali now. It’s something we watched last night. She is a voracious reader whose appetite for Bengali literature is immense. Tagore’s Chokher Bali seems to be one of her favourites. This was the first Rituparno Ghosh film I saw. I only heard praises and did not watch anything. Such a tender director. The mise-en-scene is so detailed, the way men and women are captured, like they are precious figurines, and the director, on his whim, is making them play dress up and asking them to say the dialogue for the camera. The realism exists in the story, as far as the acting, the drama, and the art direction go, the film has its own language there, and throughout it only follows that. The way women drape their sarees in the film kept reminding me of Raja Ravi Varma’s women. A tender gaze and yet overwhelmed with whatever is happening around them.
Tagore seems to be processing his own life through the story. The Bengali household, the adultery, the loneliness, the immense love that springs in the heart — all things the great poet is already familiar with. I have read parts of Geetanjal, and it is striking how his poems are never intrusive; they don’t make you stand up in revolt; the poems don’t warrant a reaction. Not an outside reaction.
Tagore leaves you thinking of yourself every time, you see your own mortality in the poems, and you see your shortcomings in his characters.
