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Magazine
Past, present ... and the future
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Goutam Ghose's "Abar Aranye", which won the Audience Award for the Best Indian Film at the Cinefan Festival 2003, takes off from where Satyajit Ray's "Aranyer Din Ratri" ended. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN talks to the filmmaker.
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SEQUELS are usually damp squibs. Was he not daunted by the idea of continuing Satyajit Ray's "Aranyer Din Ratri" (Days and Nights in the Forest) with an "Abar Aranye" (In the Forest Again)?
Bengali film maker Goutam Ghose's answer is streaked with a Mona Lisa smile. "I'd always wanted to make a film on a journey. Watching Ray's films again and again as I made my documentary on him, I suddenly thought, my God, here it is, why not put the same actors "In the Forest Again"?"
Not a sequel he hastens to explain, but a take off from Ray's film to tell a different story in another time, in a common journey undertaken by two generations. Ghose dismisses the generation gap as a cliché. He sees time as a continuum, with a thin, illusory line between past, present and future. "Socio-economic pressures make us say things were different 30 years ago, but the changes are external, not internal." He saw that in his film, time could become a vital, multi-directional metaphor, reflecting a reality quite different from Ray's vision. "Cinema is an incredible medium for shared experiences, overcoming the limitations of time and space."
Ghose announced his film amidst scepticism. Was he competing with the master? "Certainly not. This is a tribute to Ray."
Ray's film was based on novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay's description of cutting himself off from civilisation on a trip to the Palamau sanctuary — with friends, local liquor, and tribal girls. Ray transformed the bohemian interlude into a study of the discoveries and self-discoveries, of Bengali bhadralok far from the madding crowd. He retained mahua liquor and tribal sensuality, but brought in the prissiness of the urban middleclass, plus his own reticence.
"Aranyer Din Ratri" (1969) may not represent the best of Ray, but it has what he did best, those gleams of the unspoken, ambiguity, paradox. Take the naiveté of the characters — from Samit Bhanja's craze for the Santhal girl to Kaberi Bose dressing herself as a tribal to lure Subhendu Chatterji, Sharmila Tagore's perpetual trimness, Soumitra's inhibitions — all charming at one level and repellent at another. Ray builds the episodic structure of a break-from-the-routine jaunt.
"Abar Aranye" begins with Tagore's voice recapping events from then to now. Rabi Ghosh is no more. Ironically, the wisecracking sportsman Samit Bhanja is terminally ill, with a much younger, hard drinking, fast driving wife in Rupa Ganguly. Soumitra has married Sharmila (as per Ray's hint), whose daughter (Tabu) has completed her internship in the U.S. The young girl is traumatised by the loss of her Turkish boyfriend Yilmaz in the 9/11 disaster. Subhendu Chatterji has become a famous writer but not necessarily more sensitive (the film suggests a creeping complacency), with a wife of homespun virtues.
The young people have their own kind of pep and desolation, of which the song on Che Guevara bears aural testimony. They can be both idealistic and nail-hard. Each deals with the world in his/her own way, as yet untouched by the self-deceptions riddling the parent generation. Ghose's film seems to say, okay, Ray's film brought some revelations, but they need to be re-examined and reforged now.
Bhanja supplies a point of introspection. He had himself suggested that he play the terminally ill patient. You wonder, with his real life chemotherapy sessions between shots, was the man acting at all? The screening at the Cinefan festival of Asian cinema (July 2003, New Delhi), became a tribute to the actor who died that day.
There are motifs in the movie, but no story. The holidayers enter dark areas within. Bhanja tries to be the life and soul of the party, but cannot forget that life will go on, he will not. Soumitra's idle binoculars suddenly take in Bhanja in his own wife's arms. Their bonding has a dimension that Bhanja's caring wife Rupa Ganguly cannot reach. The jealous tea estate manager converts his wife's hospitality to flirtation. Their child is glued to the computer. The memory game replayed after the years brings new names and new fears.
The region, once full of prosperity with tea and dolomite mining, is now a derelict wasteland. The tea stall, a hangout for jobless drifters, is destroyed by the police. When Tabu falls into the river and is saved by tribals for whose betterment the activist schoolmaster asks for a "ransom" — with her consent — the city men who had trounced Bush and Bin Laden, see him as a terrorist.
They ensure the arrests of people with whom Tabu thought she would find peace, and a life's mission again. Sharmila had accused Soumitra of blindness towards the suffering of the tribals in Ray's film. Now she hurls the charge of hypocrisy at the men. Says Ghose, "Amritha's (Tabu) sensitivity is drawn from her mother's empathy for those in pain."
But Ghose's film is also a critique of Ray. "Yes, views have changed, they should change. A trip to the forest is not a picnic. What do we know about its laws, codes and dwellers, or how they have changed over the years? We don't differentiate between terrorists and marginalised people; all tribals are Santhals to us. We go by the prevalent political diction."
Sharmila switches off the a/c in the car as they go into the jungle, but wants it on and the windows closed during the return journey. "Back to the cocooned, insulated life, to avoiding issues and questions." Ghose leaves us with an unspoken query: can blinkers provide safety for the bhadralok? Aren't the educated middle classes more estranged from their own reality than in Ray's time? We wonder — in this context does "Abar Aranye" (in the forest again) refer to the going, or the return?
Ray had his moonlit nights. Ghose has urgent, nonverbal images (as also a few blatant ones, like Tabu's toy chimp that loses its squeak at a poignant moment). The camera makes your flesh throb on mist-shrouded hills, to the elegiac flow of a nocturnal river. A broken bridge thrusts itself into nowhere, but is the only spot from where the cell phone catches signals from the outside world. A railway track vanishes into the trees. An abandoned factory spells hell to young Jishu Dasgupta, heaven to Tabu, and sheer romance to the viewer as the pair swings into an unearthly waltz in its haunting solitude. (As cinematographer for Aparna Sen's national award winner "Mr. and Mrs. Iyer", Ghose had built sets in the same factory and dreamed of using it for his own film!)
The film intercuts sepia images from Ray's film with wit and telling details. It makes daring use of black and white for the present in scenes linked to memory. But it is the music (composed by Ghose himself) that makes the film. You ask, hasn't he used Ray's overture? "Yes, but I changed the arrangement and re-recorded it. The score takes cues from Ray. Sounds western, but is based on Bhairavi. I'd say that the structure of the film is symphonic, repeating and varying the themes in its different movements." You "hear" the shades and hues in situations and characters. The flute brings nostalgia, played by the grandson of Ray's flautist.
"Paar", "Padma Nadir Maajhi", "Antarjali Yatra", "Patang, Dekha"... Perhaps none of the films in the acclaimed director's oeuvre is as highly personal as "Abar Aranye". The characters are drawn from Ghose's circle of family and friends. How did he give space to all of them, to establish identities, develop relationships? Fragmentary, but so convincing that you want to know more? "In Bengali, a film is actually called a book. I am tired of well rounded, `written' stories. But a journey necessitates unpredictability, and open endings for further developments." As in Ray? "Yes," he laughs. "In fact Tabu remarked that in a future sequel, she could play the mother, as Sharmila has done in this film!"
In his last film "Agantuk", Ray had held up a mirror to his milieu, and reflected on the next world order. In "Abar Aranye", Goutam Ghose's own journey records time present, springing from the past, seeding the future. More, he makes you see the film on its own terms.
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