mysonamartya

Recently I saw HIMGHAR (Frozen Home), a 1996 film on YouTube. I have always felt that Sandip Ray remains an under-appreciated filmmaker in Bengali cinema. People associate him mostly with Feluda films. Yet he has made fine films when he tried his hand in various genres. His works like Phatikchand, Uttoron, Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy, Himghar & Monchora tells us that he is adept at tackling different themes.

HIMGHAR feature a protagonist who was a revolutionary once but thereafter abandoned the fight and the struggle to settle down to a lower middle-class existence driven by family compulsion. A particular Ranjit Da (Deepankar Dey) is a well-wisher of the family and has risen to the higher echelons in the corporate world. Political rivalry at the workplace where our protagonist work upset him as he too could be subjected to questioning over the passage of certain business deals that required his approval ...

This work is a sensitive exploration of several themes dogging the have and the have-nots of society and touches upon issues of moral turpitude and abortion, to mention a few. Gopa Aich, Anoop Kumar, Anil Chatterjee, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Dilip Roy and others feature in the cast.

Ratings: 4/5.

Having watched 'Nirbaak' (Speechless) recently, a 2015 Bengali film directed by Srijit Mukherjee, I am in a bit of dilemma. Should I rate it as a good film, or a bad one? The initial thought that crossed my mind after the viewing of the film, which the director has dedicated to the master of surrealism- Salvador Dali, was that the film didn't make much sense to me. All the beautiful imagery and novel techniques employed in the depiction of Kolkata hitherto unseen could not force me to develop a liking for the film. Maybe the question you would pour forth is "why?". Well, for the kind of implausibility of the storyline - a women courted by three men, and hold your breath, a tree!!! Well, you can't really blame the tree for developing those amorous feelings when the lady is Susmita Sen, eh?

I have always had a soft corner for experimental films that break the conventional style, and Srijit masterfully breaks all cinematic idioms in this work and came up with a film that stretches your power of imagination and takes you on a journey rather unfamiliar on the Indian cinemascape. The film deserves a watch for the bold attempt to tell a different kind of romantic story using some brilliant cinematic moments. Anjan Dutt, Jishu Sengupta, and Ritwik Chakrabarty are the three male leads in the film, in which a dog too features in a prominent role.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

It's heartening that Bengali filmmakers have shown a zeal towards making celebral detective films / thrillers and this has always remained as a strong current in that industry in contrast to Bollywood that only occasionally comes up with a fine film on that genre. The reason can be adduced to the fact that most of the renowned writers of Bengal, be it Samaresh Basu, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Premandra Mitra, Suchitra Bhattacharyya, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sasthipada Chattopadhyay or Niharranjan Gupta, besides the ever enduring Shardendu Bandopadhyay and Satyajit Ray and many others have regularly penned detective works that tease your intelligence and keep you glued to the pages to unravel the mystery. No wonder the filmmakers are inspired by such writers and their creation.

The 2020 made 'Antardhan' directed by Arindam Bhattacharyya is a reasonably engaging thriller that keeps you engaged till the end of the storyline of a missing girl from a hill station, Kasauli, in North India. The film has an interesting twist at the end, something that the viewer would be unable to detect until the mystery gets unraveled even though the clues are infused at intermittent intervals during the progression of the story. Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Tanusree Chakraborty, Rajatava Dutta, Mamata Shankar, Harsh Chaya, Neel Mukherjee are the principal cast.

Rating: 3.9 out of 5.