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A bit of characteristically unstressed virtuosity sets the ball rolling, at the garage the camera begins on a half-silhouetted profil perdu before tracking through the window of the mechanic's office for a frame within a frame and then back out to the side of a jeep, an unbroken take with continuous dialogue. Calcutta screenwriter in broken-down taxi (Soumitra Chatterjee) and rural tea planter with guest room (Haradhan Bandopadhyay), "you need shelter and I want some company." The feint is on Frost's "A Hundred Collars" until pregnant glances between the visitor and the host's wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) reveal Chekhov as the basis, rue and yearning suffuse the secret reunion. The fellow's dithering curtailed their past romance, his attempt at a second chance bumps against her thorny opaqueness. "Need a female lead for your movie?" chuckles the oblivious husband, before adding: "Don't make me the villain." A superb Satyajit Ray miniature, exquisitely observed, quite ruthless. The heroine is a portrait painter, her smile recalled in a crowded bus becomes a turned-away scarfed head in a moving vehicle. The jovial blowhard she's married has made peace with the injustices of the caste system, whiskey is his pacifier. "Am I to carry a one-man revolution?" The restless shadow glimpsed behind a bedroom door receives pellucid attention, so does the white curtain stirred by a nocturnal breeze in the background. Polanski's Knife in the Water and Godard's Le Mépris are taken stock of, Renoir's Partie de Campagne is brought to bear on a picnic exchange timed to the slumbering husband's burning cigarette. "Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl." An incoming locomotive's headlight illuminates the gloom in the oneiric coda, the weaver of fiction blindsided by an ending beyond his control. Cinematography by Soumendu Roy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |