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Tolly
Film Review - Mando Meyer Upakhyan
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Mando
Meyer Upakhyan
: Sydney Film Festival has a long association with Indian
cinema. Since its inception in 1954, one year after the
start of the first film festival in India in Bombay, it
has been regularly screening Indian films. The first one
being Do Ankhen Bara Hath by V. Shantaram. Over the years,
there have been films from all notable directors of India
like Bimal Roy, Satyajit Roy, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen
and others. In fact Satyajit Roy was one of the first
overseas filmmaker to be invited as an honoured guest
of the festival.
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Maintaining
that tradition, the festival this year at its Golden Anniversary,
invited reputed filmmaker from Calcutta, Budhadeb Dasgupta
as an honoured guest with his latest film, Mando Meyer
Upakhyan (Tale of a Naughty Girl). It was screened at
the festival as a part of the contemporary World Cinema
Strand.
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Budhadeb
Dasgupta today is one of the leading art film makers from India.
Born in 1946, he did his MA in Economics and initially started
his career as an academician teaching Economics in Calcutta
University. But from his early age, the world of cinema had
an attraction for him. According to him, the heart of cinema
is its sequential arrangement of images. It comes to one’s
vision from various sources such as from music, poetries and
paintings. He has so far made 12 feature films, all in Bengali.
They are Dooratawa (1978), Neem Annapurna (1979), Grihajuddha
(1982), Shith Grishher Smriti (1982), Andho Gali (1984), Phera
(1986), Bagh Bahadur (1989), Tahadher Katha (1992), Charachar
(1993), Laldarza (1996) and Uttara (2000) and the current one
screened at the festival. He has also made documentaries, notable
among them are one on famous painter Ganesh Pyne and another
on Tagore Family from Jorasanko .All his films have received
a high level of exposure at various international film festivals
which includes the prestigious ones such as at Berlin, Canes
and Venice.
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on a short story by Prafulla Roy, the film is about a
fourteen year old girl Lati, whose prostitute mother Rajani
wants her to be given away as a mistress to Natabar, an
elderly rich man, whose spiritual state and moral is embodied
in two favourite activities –endlessly watching rape
scenes of Hindi films in a cinema hall which he owns and
watching white ants destroying a large tree. However Lati
went to school and can visualise the world outside the
boundaries of her current life. She has a globe, |
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where she locates distant countries such as Germany,
Italy and France. Her mind set is not to spend the rest
of her life as a prostitute like her mother. The timeline
of the story is 1969 when the first space shuttle landed
on the moon. So can she make a similar bold step as
Neil Armstrong made by landing on the moon? Budhadeb
Dasgupta's lyrical eye has turned this tale of imprisonment
and escape to one of the festival’s most distinctive
films.
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Buddhadev's
films are of class by themselves that focuses on social forces
and human behaviour. As stated earlier, he believes in telling
a story using images, covering universal social issues and
linking them to the main plot. If that be his style, he did
that very well in Mando Meyer Upakhyan. . He showed the insecurity
and helplessness of women in a male dominated society through
the life of some young girls in the prostitute quarter. His
character Ganesh as the village taxi driver symbolises existence
of a good soul in the society. He showed the fate of aged
people who are in deep search for care and affection, by introducing
an elderly couple, looking for a hospital that does not exist.
Samata
Das as young Lati fitted very well into the character, however
Rituparna Sengupta as Rajani appeared at times to be too sophisticated
as a village prostitute. It was nice to see Ketaki Dutta and
Pradip Mukherjee in their respective roles. Tapas Pal as the
taxi driver maintained his innocent and good-man image as
the kindest person of the village. The film, which was shot
brilliantly against the dry natural backdrop of rural West
Bengal, offered some breathtaking visuals. Only comment that
can be made was the use of coarse language, which perhaps
could have been avoided.
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