Many years ago, I once wrote on Konkona Sensharma´s performance in Aparna Sen´s Goynar Baksho that she would have been as well en excellent silent film actress. When I saw her most recent work as a director, The Mirror (her contribution for the Netflix episodical film Lust Stories 2), I can imagine her as well as a great silent film director.
Just after the first shots, The Mirror distinguishes itself from the other three episodes as a piece of very concentrated pure cinema. The most striking aspect is a this very complex formal treatment of a short-story-like content: The wealthy woman, Ishita learns by accident that her maid has secretly sex with her man in her apartment and bed. Shocked at the beginning, she is later very excited about it. Secretly she sneaks into her own apartment to watch them. She uses a mirror through which she can watch them without being watched. The mirror is a bit like the tele lens of James Stewart´s character in one of the classic films about voyeurism, Hitchcock´s Rear Window. Both optical devices become a metaphor for the apparatus of image making itself. But the mirror in Sensharma´s film seems to be a metaphor for both the image making machines who record but also for the projected image. While Stewarts observation point is (except for the last 30 minutes) a relatively save place to enjoy his voyeurism without being seen, the mirror used by Ishita is a much more insecure place. The danger to be discovered is here from the beginning very close. Only the audience gets the information that the servant discovers her observer very soon. While the close ups of Stewart´s face in Rear Window suggest for a long time superiority of the observer towards the observed, the close ups of Ishita (Tillotama Shome) display a strange vulnerability, almost nakedness. Ironically, when in both films the devices of secretly observation are discovered and herewith out of function, another illusion breaks: the illusion of the distant observer, the safe voyeurism. The moment the things we see, which move, disturb, scare or excite us - the distance is broken. What we see and how we see has to do with ourselves and there is no escape from it. While Rear Window leads finally to a naked fear of death, The Mirror leads finally to a power struggle between mistress and servant but as well to an unwelcome and sudden awareness of Ishitas loneliness.
Even though the film displays some sex actions, they are well integrated in the economical, reserved style of the film. And cinema is not always what it displays but sometimes what it hides. Sometimes we get what we want to see and a second later it is taken away from us. A small traveling movement of the camera away from the door entrance and the whole action is hidden. The Mirror is as well a film about the lust of seeing and among so much other things it is a film about glances. But it is also about the difference between the technical and arranged simulated glances of the camera and the human glances, finally a strange ballet of glances. Tillotama Shome is one of these actresses who can tell very much in a short time just through glances, the most essential aspect of cinema. It reminds me what Tag Galagher said in his feature on Max Ophüls´ Letter From An Unknown Woman (Every good film is as well about moviemaking) or in Truffaut (who believed as a young critic that a good film must have both: an idea about the world and an idea about filmmaking).
Without stressing the comparison between Sensharma`s episode with the the other 3 parts of Lust Stories 2, Sensharma avoids nearly all kinds of easy entertainment, exotism or dramatic effects. There is a certain soberness in The Mirror beginning already with the opening shot as a hint to contemporary Mumbai. Voyeurism, obsessions and lust is here growing between a sad and sober reality. To express desire, longing or just lust, Sensharma tends rather to a certain minimalism. The fascination or sometimes the subversive element of a film is not only presented by what it reveals but very often by what it evokes in the characters and in the spectator equally.
One can see something like a New Wave of Indian cinema with filmmaker all in the Thirties of early Forties like Pushpendra Singh, Akshay Indikar, Atanu Ghosh, Rima Das, Konkona Sensharma and many others I have not mentioned or which I still have to discover. That might be enough talent to lead cinema into the next decades. But very few of their films happen with generous support, most of them hardly without self exploitation. One can wonder that these films exist at all.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Notes_
There is an interesting article by Sohini Chattopadhyay in Moneycontrol called Director Konkana Sen Sharma on shades of 36 Chowringhee Lane(Link) in The Mirror. She compares aspects of Aparna Sen´s wonderful film debut with Sensharma´s latest film.
An old review of mine on Sensharmas first long feature film A Death in the Gunj (Link) from my blog.
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