Reeling in the Real

My Mirror column:

Twenty years after his Baishey Shravana, Mrinal Sen revisited the subject of famine with Akaler Sandhane, producing a fascinating film about films.

“Mrinal Sen was the lead player, in a shining cast of recipients for the national awards given away by the President Shri Neelam Sanjiva Reddy in the 28^th National Film Festival held in Delhi on April 23, 1981,” reads the 1981 film festival catalogue. The film that won Sen not just the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film but also the National Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay – as well as Best Editing for its editor Gangadhar Naskar – was called Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980).

It was Sen's second time making a film about famine. The first time was Baishey Shravana (1960), which I wrote about in the column before this one. Unlike Baishey, which was a period film set during the historical 1943 Bengal famine, Akaler Sandhane was set in the present. A modern film crew from the city arrives in a village to shoot a film about the 1943 famine, and finds itself embroiled in fractious local divisions.

When the film opens, it presents us with two worlds that seem equally generic, undifferentiated: a busload of shrill urbanites with little interest in the village beyond its use as a 'location', and a mass of villagers who look upon the arriving film crew with a mixture of awe and suspicion. As the crew spends time in the village, bridges are built between these worlds: the lapsed local folk actor who appoints himself the crew's caretaker and informant, or the film's heroine Smita (played by the late Smita Patil) establishing a personal connection with the last remaining occupants of the zamindar bari -- including the solitary lady of the house who watches the film crew at work, clearly a cinematic precursor to Kirron Kher's character in Rituparno Ghosh's Bariwali.

Sen's gentle, observational style manages to slowly unpack both sides. Yet the closer the interaction between them, the more the gulf seems to widen.

The film operates simultaneously at several levels. Deceptively unstructured in the way it seems to unfold, it moves constantly between the film-within-a-film; the interactions on the film set -- in which we have the sharp-shooting director (Dhritiman Chatterjee playing a version of himself), the flamboyant actor (Dipankar De, also playing a version of himself), two actresses and a production manager; and the village, into which we make sorties, usually with members of the film crew.

Several of these sorties make direct reference to the power of cinema in the world. The global reach of Hollywood is signalled in an amusing village-level advertising campaign for a local outdoor screening of Guns of Navarrone, said to star “the great actor Anthony Queen” and “the most beautiful woman in the world”. In another wonderful conversation, the local theatre actor says he's been told his face has a Russian cut, and also that he was so starved of good scripts that he had once sent to Calcutta for a copy of a book by (or perhaps about) Karl Marx.

At other times, Sen refers obliquely to his own previous film about the famine, such as with the opening shot of the train, or with the repeated sequence of Dipankar's character excitedly reporting the arrival of the military in the village. At a more philosophical level, too, Akaler Sandhane and Baishey Shravana share a preoccupation with how human beings react to the pressure of a calamity like famine: which values are suspended, who is allowed to suspend them, which things ought to be forgiven and which are not.

On the one hand, the film points out the irrationality of people's responses to performance: the villagers are attracted to the glamour and money of the cinema, but take offence when the village's women are asked to audition for the part of a prostitute. On the other, Sen's superbly understated direction nudges us to see the recurring parallels between the cinematic and the actual world. Akaler Sandhane contains not one but three handicapped/paralysed husbands, their emasculation by circumstances making them unfairly suspicious of their wives.

Misunderstandings grow rife, and as always, the supposed honour of women becomes the node around which insults begin to fly.

At one level, the filmmakers seem unable to communicate with the world in which they are filming, completely cut off from the social mores and power centres that govern the village. That distrust of the people is gestured to again and again by Sen, when he has film crew members say such things as “The public is erratic”, and ends by having the sage old village schoolmaster recommend that they finish shooting in a studio where “there will no fear of the people”.

But at another level, that breakdown of communication is precisely because of the unexpected resonances between the film and reality, which are so strong as to end up threatening the existing power structures of that reality. The film crew represent a privileged elite, yes – but the only reason they get under the villagers' skins is because the past their film digs up is too close for comfort for many members of the village. The reel is too real.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Feb 2019.