Theatre person Sourav Palodhi’s first feature film Onko Kee Kothin was an amazing blend of education, information and entertainment. It also threw a sociological insight into children from the margins of society desperately trying to build a hospital in their slum pocket so that sick people find medical help easier to access. It is not just a beautiful debut, it is unforgettable. Onekdin Por (After a Long Time) is Palodhi’s second directorial feature produced by actor Prosenjit Chatterjee.
Comparisons between these two directorial films are bound to arise and in this sense, Onekdin Pawr turns out to be somewhat of a disappointment. The story begins with three pairs of senior citizens with one full-time maid servant Maya (Sanjita) and a pretty care-attendant Mallika (Chitrangada Satarupa) in an ancestral home owned by the retired teacher Biswanath (Sankar Debnath), a widower, who, by mutual consent, lives with his childhood friend Ashish (Biplab Bandopadhyay) along with his wife Nibha (Seema Mukhopadhyay) and Paritosh (Bimal Chakraborty).
They have all retired from their professional lives. They enjoy their retired lives which kind of brightens up when another elderly lady (Senjuti Mukherjee) who, quite Westernised and flirty, and has an age hangup, joins them and makes a beeline for widower Biswanath who begins to enjoy the attention. Mallika travels to this house partly by bus and partly on a bicycle to stay away from her alcoholic father (Debesh RoyChoudhury) and mother who are either fighting tooth and nail or being lovey-dovey in turns. Mallika is friendly with her co-traveller Sayak (Bimal Giri) whose sole focus in his lonely life is his daughter Teesta who lives with her mother as her parents are separated.
This quiet and subdued friendship is underwritten with a delicate love story which Sayak is quite aware of but Malllika neither accepts nor acknowledges. The third segment spells out the love affair between the roadside tea-stall boy Shibuda and the deaf-and-mute Barsha (Suparna Das) who boosts Mallika’s eagerness to learn the sign language she speaks in and finally, Mallika uses the language to accept Sayan’s love. There are some flashbacks to show Mallika’s father having a crush on the young Maya which is not only superfluous but also quite jarring. So are the terrible squabbles and incredible make-ups of Mallika’s parents who depend entirely on their daughter and are panicked when they find her carrying a young man on her bicycle. Natural, but superfluous.
The moot question the film raises around the middle of the narrative is – what is one’s purpose in life? One needs a purpose to live the rest of one’s life when age creeps in and words like “ambition”, “career” and “bank balance” are redundant. But Mallika is young and so is Sayak. The film has an open-ended script with the characters living in peace with one another having found their individual ‘purposes.’ Palodhi is one of the founder-leaders of a well-known theatre group Icchhemoto so he has assembled a very talented crowd of theatre veterans to perform in the film and they have enriched every frame with their spontaneous performances.
Add to this the wonderful acting by Chitrangada Satarupa, Bimal Giri and the actor who plays Bishuda with his marvelous dancing and Suparna as his girlfriend, the deaf-mute Barsha. However, there are several weaknesses in the flow of the story. Biswanath’s son’s three-day visit to meet his father is spent on drinking some Scotch and Biswanath also offers some to his deceased wife’s garlanded picture. This is out of tune. The three children of Ashish who live abroad remain as distant from the parents as stars in the sky till the twist in the tale reveals the emotional pain of emptiness and realization. But the narrative is quite weak and so is the script where the sub-tracts have neither beginning, nor middle, nor end.
The opening frame is within a public bus showing Sayak leaving the seat beside him empty which soon gets occupied by Mallika and we learn that they know each other. The striking segments happen in the scenes that show Sayak and his daughter sharing secrets in a taxi, Sayak and Mallika’s silent communication and small slices of their growing closeness with Mallika giving him the tiffin she brought for herself, Sayak staring wistfully at a large plastic ball lying on his sofa, Sayak paying Bishuda for the tea he and Mallika had shared, and some more along similar lines.
But small bits do not a beautiful film make and inspite of all that spoofing around the word “purpose,” the film falls rather flat in the end. But congratulations to producer Prosenjit Chatterjee for giving the young and talented director a boost. The music is okay but the song sung by each character falls quite flat. The exterior shots of Mallika riding her bicycle or Bishuda busy dancing away to a loud Hindi song playing on his transistor are telling comments on life in a small-town suburb of Kolkata, far from the madding crowds of the city. And why on earth is the film named Onekdin Por? I do not know. Do you?
(THE REVIEWER IS A VETERAN FILM CRITIC. VIEWS)