DVD REVIEW: Shob Charitro Kalponik (2009)

PRETENTIOUS MARITAL DRAMA

Radhika (Bipasha Basu) has recently lost her husband Indraneel (Prosenjit) to a sudden stroke. He was an engineer by profession, but a poet at heart, and his love for poetry obscured all other aspects of his life, including his role as a married man. Now, Radhika must undertake a painful journey into her memories to unravel facets of his personality that had escaped her scrutiny in their years together. A condolence meeting is organised in Neel’s memory and various people come up to the podium to speak of him in laudatory words that inevitably mark such occasions.

Initially we see Rai (as he fondly called her) squirm in her chair – for each speaker’s words and rendition of Neel’s poetry brings back bitter memories of everyday events in the couple’s life, embellished more often than not, by his apparent insensitivity and her misgivings. He is too wrapped in his own fantastic universe and the company of friends to care for practical life. She must therefore shoulder the responsibility of keeping the home fires burning entirely on her own. Their differences originate from dramatically opposing personalities (her sophistication versus his unshaven, dishevelled appearance; her fondness for the English language, his obsession with Bengali, her rootedness, his disconnect with reality), then graduate to her increasing frustration with his almost childish self-obsession.

It isn’t hard to see why she’s exasperated with the man when he resigns from his job without consulting with her, squanders her money on feeding worthless friends, doesn’t reach out to comfort her even when she’s burning with fever and neglects to inform her about her mother’s illness. No wonder then that she’s about to leave him. But before she can do that, he dies. And so she must come back, turn away from the sensible friend and sometimes lover Shekhar (Jisshu Sengupta) whom she’s planning to elope with, and, instead, delve into her husband’s work to make sense of his peculiar genius, his love for her and her own ambiguous feelings towards him.

Ironically, for a man of such poetic proclivities, Neel is never shown expressing his affection towards Rai in any tangible manner. Throughout the flashback sequences she’s constantly angry with him for his uncaring ways. Which, in the light of her late admiration of his poetry and eventually of the husband she could never appreciate in his lifetime, seems strange. She may have been his muse. He may have been a great poet. And she may have grown to acknowledge his talent after his death. But what’s the point of it all?

Rituparno Ghosh, while setting out to portray an intelligent and strong-willed  woman stifled in a loveless marriage, ends up eulogising the evidently selfish, Devdas-like male protagonist instead. And so she must grow to love this man posthumously, accept the bond of matrimony that she was to break off (and, in all probability would have done so if he hadn’t died) and seek solace in a lonely life in the company of his poems and a larger-than-life black & white portrait of him that looms over her drawing room.

And thus the archetypal Bengali marital tragedy is complete. It’s accompanied by Joy Goswami’s soulful poetry (specially written for the film), and artful cinematography by Soumik Haldar. Bipasha Basu hasn’t got many meaty roles in Hindi cinema (barring the notable exception of Madhur Bhandarkar’s Corporate), but Ghosh vests faith in her to pull of a complex character and by and large, she redeems herself. That her voice has been dubbed by a woman with a far thinner tone than Basu’s mars her performance to some extent. Prosenjit is such a veteran with these characters, he could practically sleepwalk through the role.  

I remember watching Ghosh’s Dosar and liking it a lot. In the context of that film, and the inherent contradictions that underline Shob Charitro Kalponik, this take on marital misgivings is a pale shade of the earlier one.