Obituary: Mrinal Sen 1923-2018

FILMS WITHOUT FEAR

Filmmaker Mrinal Sen, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, never stopped experimenting.

Mrinal Sen made his first film in 1955, the same year his contemporary Satyajit Ray made his illustrious debut. Pather Panchali made Ray an instant sensation. Sen’s Raat Bhore – competing in the cinemas of Calcutta with Shree 420, Nagin, Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, two Dilip Kumar films, the Suchitra Sen starrer Bhalobasa, as well as Pather Panchali – sank without a trace.

It took him until 1959 to make a second movie. Neel Akasher Neechey, about an immigrant Chinese peddler’s bond with a nationalist Bengali woman, was a hit, garnering praise from both Jawaharlal Nehru and the Communist Party. Though he later expressed embarrassment about its sentimentality, it launched a remarkable career. It got Sen a producer for his third film, Baishey Shravana. A dark take on the human condition set against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine, Baishey earned plaudits in London and Venice. It also caused some controversy at home, partly because it used the hallowed date of Tagore's death anniversary— the 22^nd of the Indian month of Shravana—as its title, while being starkly, deliberately un-Tagorean. Mrinal Sen had arrived.

Between 1960 and 2002, Sen directed 25-odd features, winning awards nationally and abroad, from Karlovy Vary to Cannes. Unlike the perfectionist Ray, with whom he had a complicated relationship, Sen remained the eternal experimenter, making films as various as the devastating Akaler Sandhane and the cheeky Bhuvan Shome. He could handle adivasi-colonial drama (Mrigayaa) as comfortably as the contemporary politics of Naxalism (the Calcutta Trilogy: Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik) or middle class morality (Ek Din Pratidin). Sen's films were as likely to draw on the headlines as a personal experience in the city's streets, like witnessing a serpentine queue for a RBI jobs in Dalhousie Square (this was the germ of Chorus).

He was avidly political but toed no party line, and though a lover of literature, could sometimes seem more interested in the episodic film form. Even when he drew on the Indian literary greats, he was unafraid to alter them: in his Oka Oorie Katha, Premchand's chilling tale 'Kafan' became even more nihilistic, while also moving from an Uttar Pradesh setting to a Telugu-speaking one; his hauntingly evocative Khandhar transported Premendra Mitra's classic 1930s story 'Telenapota Abishkar' beautifully into the 1980s—complete with a photographer protagonist.

Born in 1923 to a lawyer in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh), Sen moved to Calcutta in 1940 to attend Scottish Church College. His subject was physics, but politics and literature drew him more. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay's fine 1995 biography suggests a voracious mind soaking up all he could from the city's cultural and intellectual spaces. After graduating, jobless and hard-up, he discovered the Imperial (now National) Library, where he spent 10 hours a day for five years, teaching himself many things, including cinema. He engaged in the vibrant Marxist addas of the time, watched plays at the Indian People’s Theatre Association (meeting Ritwik Ghatak there), and became a regular at the Calcutta Film Society formed in 1947 by Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta, though he couldn’t afford the fee.

Sen’s career had a lifelong openness. New routes excited him more than the well-trodden path, even if this meant losing his way occasionally. Inspired by watching The 400 Blows in Bombay in 1965, for example, Sen adopted the French New Wave’s jump cut, voiceover, stills and freeze frames into his next film, Akash Kusum—famously receiving brickbats in The Statesman, and triggering an infamous public spat with Ray. He dared mix up a Manto story with Tagore's 'Hungry Stones', and then cast the Hindi film star Dimple Kapadia in the resulting Bengali film (Antareen). Even when making a quietly accomplished film like Ek Din Pratidin, in which a young woman's delayed return from work becomes the vortex of social hypocrisy, Sen retained his agent provocateur persona, refusing to answer viewers who agitatedly demanded to know what 'actually happened'.

His politics could be fearlessly direct. He was thrilled with a German critic’s words about Calcutta 71: “This is a film which is not afraid to be taken as a pamphlet.” But he would never do it because it was expected of him. In later years, when asked why the dead servant boy’s father never slaps the callous, casteist employers in his masterful Kharij, Sen apparently said, “He did. He slapped all of us. Didn’t you feel it?”

We did, Mr Sen, we did.

A shorter version of this piece was published in India Today magazine, in the 14 Jan 2019 issue.

Up in the Clouds

My Mirror column:

Soumitra Chatterjee, who turned 83 on 19 January, should be counted among the greatest Indian actors ever, and Mrinal Sen’s Akash Kusum among his most memorable roles.

The great actor Soumitra Chatterjee turned 83 on 19th January, last Friday. If you're thinking “Soumitra, who?”, you've been missing out, and this is as good a time as any to remedy that situation.

Born in 1935, Soumitra made his cinematic debut in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), the final film in the Apu Trilogy, coming after Pather Panchali and Aparajito. He went on to become Ray's go-to hero. Their long collaboration spanning fourteen films, from certified early masterpieces like Devi (1960) and Charulata (1964), right down to the end of Ray's career with Ganashatru (1989) and Shakha Proshakha (1990).

He was also Ray's choice when the director decided to make films based on his mystery stories featuring the detective Pradosh Mitter, better known as Feluda.

Soumitra didn't just embody Feluda in the films – Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress, 1974) and Joi Baba Felunath (1979) – he also informed Ray's sketches of Feluda in the stories Ray wrote in the 70s. As Feluda, Soumitra was urbane, confident and extremely knowledgable, making him a sort of unspoken role model -- not just for Topshe, his younger cousin, assistant in detection and narrator of the stories, but for the generations of Bengali-reading children who grew up watching him. Especially when juxtaposed against the third member of the mystery-solving team, the comically enthusiastic Lalmohan Ganguli, Feluda was the epitome of sophistication and logic. Feluda was almost never wrong.

In his other films, though, it seems to me that what made Soumitra such an unusual hero was precisely the opposite. Right from his debut film, he seemed able to project onto the screen not just charm and likeability but an inner vulnerability.

Sometimes, as in Apur Sansar, that vulnerability broke through to the surface and overflowed – the grief of losing his wife in childbirth turns the young Soumitra irrationally against his son, and he abandons not just the child but the very idea of home.

In Charulata, his character's weakness remains more at the level of suggestion, while in the underwatched Kapurush-Mahapurush, he is the eponymous 'Kapurush': the coward, a man whose courage fails him.

But the Soumitra performance I want to revisit today is not in a Satyajit Ray film. It is a film made by Mrinal Sen, who is, along with Ritwik Ghatak, one of the trilogy of greats of Bengali art cinema. Akash Kusum (Up in the Clouds, 1965), interestingly released in the same year as Kapurush, starred Soumitra as a young man who, in trying to impress the girl he is courting – a very young and lovely Aparna Sen (credited as Aparna Dasgupta, her maiden name) – spins an entire web of untruths from which he cannot eventually extricate himself.

Soumitra's Ajoy Sarkar is a rare character in Bengali cinema. Unlike the educated young men of the 1960s Bengali middle class, on screen and off, Ajoy refuses to join the ranks of jobseekers. He wants, instead, to start a business. The film maps the dubiousness of his particular business venture onto Ajoy's growing fantasy life, with marvellous subtlety.

The lifestyle to which Ajoy aspires seems to him only just outside his grasp. His girlfriend Moni (Aparna) inhabits her wealth with an ease that is to the manner born, and she seems to assume that he, too, is of her world – eg. assuming he'll take a taxi when he says he hasn't got his car one day. Meanwhile his close friend Satu has the flat and job that would, in his alternative universe, be his – so Ajoy simply pretends they are. Soumitra's performance is full of fabulous touches, both in expression and gesture. It's also meta: this is an actor showing us a character who is constantly acting in real life. Asked by Moni whether he is free to watch a film next Wednesday, he makes her wait on the phone while he pretends to consult an imaginary diary. Meeting up with her in a sari shop, he makes the unsolicited offer of buying her one – only to then stage an elaborate charade about having had his pocket picked on the way there. Soumitra captures to perfection both the expansive gestures that seem to constitute Ajoy's vision of himself -- and the stubborn, almost childish, resistance he shows when his friend or his mother try to call him out on his pipe dreams.

Akash Kusum is a fascinating moment in film history for many reasons. Mrinal Sen, having watched Jules et Jim and 400 Blows as part of a package of films from the French Consulate in Bombay in January 1965, adopted from Francois Truffaut stylistic elements that had become integral to the French New Wave: the jump cut, the voiceover, the use of stills and freeze frames.

But Akash Kusum released to a controversial reception in Calcutta, leaving critics and audiences baffled or unimpressed. A war of words about its “topicality” in The Statesman, involving the paper's film critic and the film's writer Ashish Barman, ended with none other than Satyajit Ray attacking the film in brutal terms.

It seems that most viewers condemned Ajoy as an out-and-out conman, and thus undeserving of sympathy. The only way in which the film could redeem itself, said the Statesman’s critic, was by ending on a comic note. They couldn't have been more wrong. The lightness of Soumitra's conman act is integral to the final note of tragedy.

Watching Akash Kusum in 2018, it seems not just topical but prescient in its grasp of a world where there are more and more things only just beyond one's reach.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jan 2018.