Cast: Aparna Sen, Konkona Sen Sharma, Rajat Kapoor, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Koushik Sen, Saheb Bhattacharjee
Director: Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen's 'Iti Mrinalini' is not so much of a bad film as it is a disappointing film, coming as it does after the exquisite 'The Japanese Wife.'
The story is about Mrinalini, an actress well past her prime. On the night of the premiere of her latest movie, she realizes that her director-cum-lover Imtiaz (played by Priyanshu Chatterjee) has moved on to his new, younger actress and she decides to end her life.
Why exactly? Specially since it is explicitly shown in the movie that there never were any promises of exclusive togetherness exchanged between the two.
And that is precisely my grouse with the film. It is very inconsistent and desultory. For a movie like this to work the central character needs to be very clearly etched out. Mrinalini, sadly, is a meek and a rather unremarkable woman.
Even in her introductory scene (Konkona plays the younger Mrinalini), when she is sitting with her student revolutionary friends she is happy to merely blend in. When in bed with her boyfriend, all she can think of is whether the fish in the aquarium have been fed.
Mrinalini is a woman whose idea of pre-coital talk is quotidian and boring. She steps down from her lofty standards of Bergman and Truffaut and happily agrees to star in director Siddharth Sarkar's (played proficiently by Rajat Kapoor and dubbed by Anjan Dutt) commercial fare and quite predictably falls for him, although having met his wife and sons.
The rationale for both her choices is not clear. And none of her actions have the rebel chutzpah which is so essential to make the audience connect and empathize with a female character of such nature. To me she looked like any other whiny mistress.
The story becomes somewhat interesting when Mrinalini has a daughter who is raised by her brother and his German wife. It is a delicate equation which is oversimplified in such a juvenile, sitcom fashion that it is hard believe it comes from someone of Sen's credentials. I liked Koushik Sen as the Booker-winning author and later Mrinalini's close confidante.
What I also found baffling and a tad annoying was the inclusion of socio-political events in the narrative - from operation Blue Star to the Mumbai blasts. It was unnecessary and typical trying-too-hard-to-be-cerebral.
Konkona does a good job even though saddled with a quarter-baked, inconsistent character.
In the end the film is reduced to just what one of its characters derisively observes about Bengali cinema - "pretentious".
Comments
0 comment