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After 10years, IFFI’s top award goes to an Indian director

Arnab Bhattacharya Arnab Bhattacharya | Exclusive |

It is after 10 years that IFFI’s top award has gone to an Indian director. “Moner Manush”, the India-Bangladesh joint production, directed by India’s Goutam Ghosh, won the top award – the Golden Peacock,  at the 41st International Film Festival of India.

The last film to win the prize was “Karunam” by Kerala’s director Jairaj in the year 2000.

“Moner Manush”, the story about the mystic bard Lalon Fakir, was chosen for the top award for its “stunning cinematic beauty and a compassionate portrayal of love in a world of hate,” said a five-member jury which had judged 18 films from 15 countries in the international competition of the Festival. The jury was headed by Polish director Jerzy Anteczak.

Fakir Lalan Shah (1774-1890), popularly known as Lalan Fakir, was the legendary mystic poet of Bengal whose songs, believed to have been numbered over 10000, have captivated Bengalis by their lyrical poignancy and mystic imagery culled from the rural life of Bengal.

With time Lalan came to embody the soul of rural Bengal, and is as much a part of lore as of reality. His birth is shrouded in mystery as is his caste identity. Lalan himself sustained that mystery deliberately so that his persona, like his songs, stands in defiance of casteism.

In fact, Lalan’s mysticism whose origin can be traced in Sufi and Bhakti movements, and also in Sahajia mode of devotion (some have also noted the influence of Buddhism and Jainism in his poetic philosophy), is impelled by a quest for an inchoate yet supreme principle of unity in life overriding schism of any sort.

No wonder that Gautam Ghose’s Moner Manus based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyaya, a premier novelist of West Bengal, is titled The Quest in English. This Indo-Bangladesh coproduction confirms Ghose’s claim as one of the most noted filmmakers in post-Satyajit Ray era of Bengali films.

The film is the 13th of his career spanning nearly 25 years. Another point to note is that this has been simultaneously released in India and Bangladesh after 58 years of a similar incident.

Already awarded the Golden Peacock, the film has been screened at the Indian Panorama Section of IFFI, 2010. In an interview, Ghose says, “I feel that the love and compassion of Lalan Fakir are relevant more than ever in today’s world of intolerance and hate.”

Obviously, Ghose intends Lalan’s philosophy to serve as an indictment of identity politics so egregiously based on the concept of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ placing a disgracefully high premium on superficial differences of identity.

The film opens with a scene of Jyotirindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore’s elder brother, drawing a sketch of the octogenarian Lalan and talking to him. Their talks epitomize the newly-kindled interest of the 19th century Bengali bhadralok community in Lalan whose philosophy appeared to them disarmingly simple yet bewilderingly rich.

The talks are interspersed with flashbacks which depict Lalan’s early life, his adoption by a Muslim weaver family, his acceptance of discipleship of Siraj Sai, his accidental return to his birth place while roaming as a baul, his chance meeting with his wife, and, above all, his victimhood of the politics of caste.

Predictably, there is a surfeit of songs which the young, middle-aged and senile Lalan breaks into every now and then. Some of the songs are Lalan classics, heard umpteenth times by the Bengali music lovers, and some others have been newly composed, keeping Lalan’s style and diction in mind. Siraj Sai’s songs, which were not available, had to be recomposed.

As Ghose says in his interview, “I went to Khustia in Bangladesh, heard from an old fakir called Abdul Kareem Shah who is 95 years old, understood the gayaki and recomposed some from traditional tunes.”

Interestingly, apart from being the cinematographer and the script writer, Ghose is also the music director of this film. He makes the narrative flow of his film mingle effortlessly with the tide of the lyrical mellifluence just as river streams mingle naturally in Bangladesh. The relationship of the narrative and the songs is not that of a container and the thing contained in this film, but of the one flowing into, and nourishing, the other.

As a cinematographer Ghose usually scores heavily in his films. This film, too, contains a substantial amount of vintage stuff of Ghose’s cinematography.

Some of the wide-angle shots depicting the Bangladesh’s riverscape, so redolent of Ghose’s Padmanadir Majhi, are truly unforgettable.

Some frames, too, linger in the mind. Old Lalan’s reflective face against the backdrop of the setting sun and the ripples of river water aglow with the twilight is one such. The dalliance of moonlight in a stream sending waves of thought in Lalan’s mind is just another instance. The film abounds with such memorable frames which are not just beautiful, but functionally important in capturing the fluctuating moods of Lalan.

Prosenjit Chatterjee casting the middle-aged and old Lalan has been exceptional. Prosenjit, the biggest box-office icon of Bengali films after Uttam Kumar, has here figured in Ghose’s films for the first time.

His acting style suggests the kind of dedication and thinking that he has put into this role. He has deglamourized himself to the extent that he looks every inch his screen persona. His physical build has, however, been something of a disadvantage because it does not have the appearance of a famished forester. Maybe that is the reason why we don’t get to see a bare-bodied Lalan once he attains the middle age in the film.

If this is a slight minus, there are other aspects of his acting which more than compensate for that. Ghose has talked about his ‘expressive eyes’. They have been deep and eloquent, always sparkling with humour. They have reflected both bhaba and passion to perfection according to the demands of the situation.

Priyanshu Chatterjee’s Jyotirindranath, too, could not have been better cast. His tall frame and sharp features have exuded the cultural sophistication of the Tagore family which represented the highest echelon of intelligentsia of the 19th century Bengal. Raisul Islam Asad’s Siraj Sai has been movingly portrayed.

Paoli Dam, though, has looked a trifle misfit in her role despite her honest attempt of adaptation. Despite her costumes, she has lacked the essential rusticity of appearance. The rural dialects of the characters, too, have at times skirted along the urban lingo, much to the viewers’ discomfort.

The film’s choreography demands a word or two. The bauls call themselves ‘pagol’ or ‘mad’. This is the madness of a quest for something unattainable. Siraj Sai’s dance, some of Lalan’s dance sequences have been devised to project the mystic frenzy of their quest. Here too, Prosenjit’s performance has been par excellence.

All this nitty-gritty apart, Ghose’s film has a larger impact. A good film is all about making that impact, about having a palpable soul under its audio-visual skeleton.
Ghose’s film makes us relive a lore which rural Bengal still feels in its pulse beats, and treasures it in its collective memory.

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