REVIEW: Iti Mrinalini

PRETENTIOUS AND POINTLESS

An aging actress has come out of self-imposed retirement of 15 years (she went off cinema because Satyajit Ray died without working with her) to play Kunti in an arty English language film about Karna. At the film’s after-party, she finds out that the much younger director (Priyanshu Chatterjee) who’s also her lover, has offered the lead role in his next to a younger actress after pledging it to her. The actress decides to commit suicide. She goes home, tells her maid she’ll be sleeping in late, and proceeds to rummage through a trunk filled with old albums, posters, diaries and other memorabilia which takes her on nostalgic journey.

Her life unspools in flashback. She may be an actress by profession, but the memories are mostly about former lovers and a love child, and about life passing her by. By the time it’s all done, dawn is breaking through. Sleeping pills in hand, she spots messages and missed calls on her phone. They’re from another lover saying, “I’m there”. She puts the pills back in the bottle for another day and takes her dog for a walk instead.

This (without exaggeration) is the plot of Aparna Sen’s new film Iti Mrinalini. It’s her most pretentious and self-indulgent work, lacking in soul and tacky in execution. Even the anticipation of watching her and daughter Konkona Sen Sharma play the same woman at different periods in her life is lost on account of the half-baked, faux screenplay. This is melodrama of the 1980s variety, both in terms of narrative and technique.

Mrinalini (Konkona Sen Sharma and Aparna Sen) was once in love with a student revolutionary (anyone who grew up in the early ‘70s in Bengal apparently was) who’s shot dead by the cops. She becomes an actress. We never get to see her struggle, beyond her being snubbed by a senior. She falls for a much-married director Siddharth (Rajat Kapoor) and bears a child by him, while she waits around for him to divorce his wife and marry her.

Then she gives up the baby to her childless brother and his Canadian wife (who speaks in an irritating nowhere accent). The child visits India every year and gets to spend time with Mrinalini and Siddharth. Another writer type, Chintan Nair, who speaks Bengali with a Malayalee accent and has allegedly won a Booker nomination, enters her life, while Siddharth’s wife gets pregnant for a third time.

Chintan chastises Mrinalini for seeking “only one kind of love”. There are many other kinds, he informs her. The most profound being the one that sets the loved one free. His own wife is suffering from debilitating arthritis and is a cripple.

Somewhere through this muddle, you’re supposed to imagine the spiritual evolution of this woman. But considering the flimsy grounds on which she decides to attempt suicide, and then abandons the thought on an equally silly one, it’s quite evident that she hasn’t really gotten much further than where she was as a young woman. Yet, Sen wants her audience to empathise with this woman. She doesn’t wish to project Mrinalini as a shallow, self-absorbed person (that would have actually made for a very interesting film), but as a tragic heroine with a strong emotional core and much righteousness.

In another evidence of absurdity, there are references to various socio-political events of different decades – from the Naxalite movement to the storming of the Golden Temple, the Kanishka air crash and even the Delhi bomb blasts of 2008 – without any serious justification for their inclusion in the narrative. Unless of course the director wanted to project her socio-political consciousness in this ham-handed way.

One expected a far more complex and insightful film from an actress-director, both as a woman’s journey and as a window to the world of cinema. Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool was about a doomed love story, but it was as much a tribute to cinema of the ‘40s and ‘50s. So was Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika -- an excellent document on the machinations of the early Indian film industry and an individual’s journey through it.  

It’s sad that the only thing worth home from Iti Mrinalini is that Konkona Sen Sharma wears the most gorgeous sarees and has never looked better; and that occasionally, the art direction (by Sen herself) gives us a sense of being transported back to another time. 

Comments

[Suzanne Bernert]

Thanks for the irritating non-accent... for a German actress playing a German-Canadian I think I did well...

luv Suzanne Bernert

[Deepa Deosthalee]

Dear Ms. Bernert,

Appreciate your feedback.

Deepa

[Suzanne Bernert]

Dear Deepa,
am touched you answered..
Tc and keep on writing...