As I can not verify if the English
title is a literally one, I like what it suggests, a house as a very
concrete building but as well a film as an imagined building.
At the beginning we see several people
gathered in a back yard for a funeral ceremony. Before we see a
photograph of the deceased, they seem to gather like people who are
waiting for a presentation on an imagined screen. A young woman
Paramita is among them, her eyes covered with huge glasses. In
flashbacks the film will tell about her memories, but will return
like a refrain always to this funeral ceremony. The titles roll on
images of empty rooms of this house with its green coloured windows
which give the interiors a ghostly greenish light, a light which
burns into our memory.
A wedding: we recognize Paramita as a
young bride during a wedding ceremony and we see the mother in law
Sanaka we identify from the photograph of the deceased at the film´s
opening scene.
The first flashback introduces one
tragic element of this film: women as prisoners in this house who
will see very seldom the natural light of the world outside. Sanaka
has a schizophrenic daughter and like a slave she is managing the
household for her husband and her other sons. Her only escape are old
films on television. In a short time Aparna Sen tells a lot about the
characters and their relationship with each other, a kind of eloquent
story telling which reminds me in some of the greatest storytellers
cinema has ever originated like Ford Ozu or Sirk.
Aparna Sen herself plays Sanaka. As I
am almost ignorant about her career as one of the most popular
stars in commercial Bengali cinema and as I heard that she was very
reluctant to perform in her own film – she offers an incredible
performance. Sanaka is an aging woman during her menopause. When she
speaks she chews almost permanently on a bethel leaf. Her first
encounter with the young bride almost seems like a prisoner is
greeting a fellow prisoner. When Paramita moves in this strange house
among people who are talking behind her back about her we get a slight idea about the
young Sanaka who also came into this house through an arranged
marriage.
Another important person is introduced.
We recognize an elder man from the funeral ceremony, Moni Biswas
played by the great Soumitra Chatterjee), He was a former lover of
Sanaka who never had the courage to escape with her and organizing an
own life far away from this orthodox and repressive family system.
When he visits this house from time to time to lend money from
Sanaka, he seems like a ghost from another option of life he and
Sanaka were not allowed to live.
Paramita gives birth to a boy. After
short moments of happiness, a doctor finds out that the boy is
handicapped, almost paralyzed and later Sanaka´s husband dies
through an accident. But this tragic circumstances bring the two
women closer together. There is a third female character typical in
the desperate loneliness of female characters in Aparna Sen´s early
films, Sanaka´s schizophrenic daughter Kuhuki. After an argument
between mother and daughter, the narration will be interrupted and we
see Khuku performing on the terrace a Tagore-song. It is one of the
few moments during tthe flashbacks when we see the sky, a slight
promise of a freedom outside this greenish prison. And while the
film´s narration is suspended for some minutes Sanaka and Paramita
are watching this performance and like so often in films by Aparna
Sen, there is an idea of an imagined screen.It is a total moment of cinema devoided of any gravitation.
Paramita and Sanaka get for s short time the taste of a new kind of
freedom. First they go to a school for handicapped children and later
they have dinner in Kolkata. Later the little boy dies and the life
of Paramita and Sanaka moves in different directions. Paramita finds
a new love and Sanaka sinks back in depressions.
The scene when the two women are
separating is one of the most heartbreaking moments in the film.
Paramita is young and strong, found a new perspective and will be
divorced from her always drunken husband. Sanaka is still too much
connected with the old family rules and will remain a prisoner. The
naturally right for self-determination of human individuals is for
women still a hard struggle. We hear Khuki singing about someone who stays alone on a sinking ship which appears as a paraphrase of Sanaka´s hurt feelings.
Even though Paramita is free from all burdens of her former family, she
returns one more time to this house. Sanaka is seriously sick and totally exposed to the people she once served. Sen´s performance resembles now these Kurosawa-characters who are
totally broken by grieve of fear and whose mental condition is visible in their crooked posture. Paramita organizes a provisory
toilette hidden behind old Saris for the sick woman, Paramita creates for her a minimal privacy. This act of
solidarity is as well an example how the characters in Aparna Sen´s
films are often mirrored in each other. Sanaka almost becomes a
variation of Paramita as an elder woman if she had stayed in this
house which is not only framed by walls but as well by oppressive
rules. This mirroring between her characters does not only reminds
me in my beloved “beings of time” defined by Marcel Proust, it
also creates the special magic that we get ideas about the different
life times of the characters like in films by Renoir, Ozu or Renoir.
This symmetry can always be broken through individual decisions like with Anjan Dutt and Rahul Bose in Mr. And Mrs. Iyer, Konkona Sen
Sharma and Moushumi Chatterjee in Goynar Baksho, Raima Sen and
Moushumi Chatterjee in The Japanese Wife and finally between
the two families in her “Romeo and Julia”-version Arshinagar.
At the end we leave with Paramita
(Rituparna Sensgupta) the gathering for the funeral ceremony like we
leave a cinema hall. The kind an Aparna Sen-films corresponds between
the fictionalized reality and the reality of the perception of cinema
and beyond belongs to me to the most exciting experiences I made with
films and whenever the seeming contradictions between classic
cinematic story telling and modernistic approaches of cinema is suspended, than in the films by Aparna Sen.
The only excuses I can offer for not
having watched Paromitar Ek Din more often are the fact that
it seems almost hidden between two of her masterpieces Yugant
and Mr. And Mrs. Iyer and the second is it had once a deep
emotional impact after a very traumatic India -trip which is o- f
course – a different story. Anyway, one thing for sure. After my
discovery of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, Aparna Sen is for me
another important access to Indian cinema.
Rüdiger Tomczak
