Meghe Dhaka Tara (2013) directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee
Have not seen a better or a more intensely rousing movie ending scene than this one. Absolutely electrifying! The song is also just marvelous, riveting. The landscape and the scenes of the video song are just brilliant! Masterpiece. Every time I see or hear it, I get goosebumps. Watch the video: Aaohaan.
Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud Capped Star) is a 2013 Indian Bengali film directed by Kamaleswar Mukherjee. The film is inspired from the life and works of Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak. The entire film is in black and white except the last scene which has been shot in colour. In this film Saswata Chatterjee plays the character of Nilkantha Bagchi and Ananya Chatterjee plays the role of Durga, Nilkantha's wife. Besides giving an account of Ghatak's life, the film also depicts the socio-political environment of contemporary West Bengal during the Tebhaga and Naxalite movements.
Kamaleshwar Mukherjee has used the metaphor of Bangabala in the closing shots of his film, where a young girl, Bangabala, from Ghatak's Jukti Takko Aar Golpo is given concrete shape to look like the rape victim Phoolmoni in the mental home (in the 2013 film). She waits for Neelkantha out in the fields, as if inviting him to join her back, to his roots in Pabna and other places in East Pakistan once a part of undivided Bengal. Mukherjee beautifully suggests the 'liberation' of Ghatak who frees himself to join his 'Bangabala' to go on a new journey and perhaps begin to rewrite his life again. Phoolmoni is liberated and so is Neelkantha. The director does not use the darkness of death but the brightness of a yellow horizon in the distance, shown in bright colour, where the two figures become smaller and smaller till the film freezes to a close.
Background:
Ghatak’s last film featured himself as the drunken and spent intellectual Neelkantha who goes on a picaresque journey through Bengal to reconcile himself with his wife. He is accompanied by Nachiketa (Burman) and Bangabala (S. Mitra), a young refugee from Bangladesh. On the way they are joined by a Sanskrit teacher, Jagannath (Bhattacharya). The episodic narrative also includes encounters with Shatrujit (Dutt) who was once a noted writer but who now writes pornography (apparently a reference to novelist Samaresh Bose); a ranting trade union leader and Panchanan Ustad (Mukherjee) who makes masks for Chhou dancers (a sequence is devoted to showing the famous dance). Jagannath is shot by a landlord when the group stumbles upon a land-grab action. The film ends with Neelkantha meeting a group of Naxalite students wanted by the police: he argues politics with them and is shot in a police ambush the next morning.
Filmed while Ghatak was ill and suffering from alcoholism shortly before his death, Jukti is an inventive and lucid though pessimistic testament film, acted with elegance and irony by the director. With an astonishing sense of freedom Ghatak weaves together different styles and images ranging from gross calendar art (the courtship of his wife) to an almost abstract dance of death; from the elaborate Chhou performance where the goddess Durga slays the demon to lyrical depictions of nature; from inserted bits of leader footage to a Baul song. The encounters with the pornographer and the Naxalites add up to a devastating critique of contemporary politics. In the end, Ghatak offers a disabused but stubborn politics of the everyday: Neelkantha dies with a quote from the Manik Bandyopadhyay story Shilpi about a weaver who wove an empty loom because ‘one must do something’. Geeta Kapur’s essay ‘Articulating the Self into History’ (1989) is the most extended study on the film.
Ritwik Ghatak was an epitome of 'anarchy in art', especially film-making! Anarchism in the Arts (Britannica link)
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