Love eternal

Shob Charitro Kalponik
Music: Sanjoy and Raja Narayan Deb
Editing: Arghya Kamal Mitra
Cast: Prosenjit, Bipasha Basu, Jisshu engupta, Paoli Dam, Sohag Sen

Radhika (Bipasha Basu) marries Indraneel (Prosenjit) and moves to Kolkata. Though Indraneel is a successful engineer, his passion for poetry distances him from the mundane responsibilities of married life. Radhika initially has no complaints about his casual approach. But she does not care for his poetry either. Her Bengali is weak. The marriage begins to fall apart. Indraneel tries to make amends but Radhika is disgusted by then, because he has quit his job without telling her. She finds solace in the company of her close colleague (Jisshu Sengupta). The news of her husband bagging the most prestigious literary award for his poetry apparently leaves her unmoved. Just when she decides to divorce him when she is away in Jamshedpur, she hears that Indraneel has died of a massive heart attack. Her world collapses around her because this is not the kind of separation she had imagined.
She rushes back. She must attend the memorial function held in his honour. As noted poets and elocutionists of the city recite Indraneel’s poems, she is shocked to discover that all his poems are linked to the moments they shared within their marriage - mundane, angry, earthy and loving. Even his unnamed poem is a tribute to a day they shared once in the forests beside a river. Her colleague, a devoted fan of Indraneel’s poetry, hopes for a new life with Radhika. But something has changed between them. Radhika discovers her husband and her love for him all over again. He lives on in her fantasies, in her dreams and illusions, communicating with her, not as a ghost from the dead, but perhaps with lines from the poetry he has written, the only love she has ever known, now moved beyond death. For Radhika and Indraneel, the love story through their poetry, begins again.

Technical expertise
This is the first film where Rituparno explores the world of poetry and invests it with visual richness, mapping the fragility and infinity of love between a man and a woman who do not share the language - she is more at home with English while he is rooted into Bengali. Their cultural background is distanced too. She once translated a Tagore poem and passed it off as her own. He writes poetry only in Bengali. She is practical, realistic and responsible, while he is just the opposite. He tries to build bridges between them but cannot change himself because he is made that way.
Exploring constantly with form and technique without moving away from his narrative, Ghosh uses two framing devices to structure his story from Radhika’s point of view. The main framing device is a glass-paned window of a moving train that forms the opening and the closing frames. Within this, there is a sub-frame structured as the memorial service held in tribute of Indraneel and his poetry, coinciding with his having won a top literary award just before his death. The opening frame cuts back and forth to a few shots of the marriage, Radhika stepping into Indraneel’s home and then suddenly, Radhika asking the maid Nandor Maa whether she is supposed to wear white at the function. The function, dotted with recitations of Indraneel’s poems takes Radhika into a journey of discovery of the content and context of his poetry that speaks of his intense love for her. The only confusion the film leaves behind is the poet’s muse. But then, it could be one more illusion of Radhika’s.

Shob Charitro Kalponik lives up to the title. Are these characters for real? Or are they illusion and fantasy, existing in limbo, beyond time and place and challenging death with love? The rhythm and pace of the film are lyrical, soaked with the Joy Goswami poetry, the song and music of Lalon Phokir and contemporary music by the composer duo. The time setting is often established through sound - like the sound of dhaak suggesting Durga Pooja or the chanting of mantras hinting at some religious ceremony. The film is an effective visualisation of poetry and human emotions enriched by the brilliant acting of Prosenjit, Bipasha Basu, Jisshu Sengupta and Sohag Sen. As Indraneel, Prosenjit brings a loving and adorable poet alive in life and in death. “Who shaved him?” asks Radhika, again and again, seeing the clean-shaven face on the dead body. Bipasha, stripped completely of her sexy image, is low-key yet aggressive, vulnerable yet strong, often emoting only with her eyes. It is a pity her voice is dubbed. Jisshu sparkles as the understanding friend puzzled about the way things are working out. Soumik Haldar’s cinematography challenges convention with an abundance of whites and light blues in a coloured film. He captures the fog in the dream scenes with equal fluency. Arghya Kamal Mitra’s editing translates Ghosh’s complicated screenplay seamlessly. Huge photographic images of Indraneel in black-and-white fill the backdrop and foreground defining his powerful presence transcending death.
Shob Charitro Kalponik deserves four stars. One for the direction, one for the acting, one for the cinematography and one for the music.
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