Yours Truly review: An affecting ode to loneliness

Sanjoy Nag posits this tale of longing in Calcutta, a city so frequently left behind that it is almost fated to be loved in retrospect. A lonely city housing lonely people. But the director abstains from voicing the grievances of the city and the protagonist on being forgotten. Rather, he infuses his narrative with much warmth. Surrounded by tenants who not only vocally remind her how lonely she is but on nights, owing to the “sounds one cannot control”, ensure she longingly looks at her empty bed, Mithi seems strikingly similar to the middle-aged Banalata, the achingly lonely protagonist of Rituparno Ghosh’s Bariwali (The LandLady). Much like Mithi, Banalata (a brilliant Kirron Kher) is engulfed in solitude. But unlike Nag’s protagonist, Banalata’s loneliness is palpable. It makes her acutely vulnerable, prey to the wants of others. It robs her of her dignity and faith, reducing her to a wreck before her own eyes. Nag’s premise might seem similar to Ghosh’s 2000 film (Banalata, like Mithi, writes letters to the man she had fallen in love with and receives no reply), but his gaze is tender, benign almost. Mithi’s loneliness, unlike the one inhabited by Banalata, does not come across as shameful. It makes her vulnerable but not helpless.

Nag, who dealt with loneliness in a more definitive way in his 2010 film Memories in March (a mother comes to know of the sexual identity of her son after his death, and is left alone to grieve for him and come to terms with who he really was), is more nuanced this time around. In his latest film, he does not view loneliness as a condition contingent on something, rather as a continuous, pervasive state of being, and succeeds in presenting an intimate portrayal of loneliness and the lonely. It is most evident in the way he presents Mithi when alone, especially when she is writing letters or eating. It is just she who occupies the frame, as Nag resists the urge to show an empty chair next or opposite to her, implying how intrinsic loneliness is and how difficult and reductive to illustrate.

One might argue that this robs loneliness of its romanticism, making it seem mundane almost: Mithi does not suffer from the tragedy Banalata did, her heart does not shatter like the latter’s. She also lacks the brave heartedness Ila from The Lunchbox exhibited. Mithi, in her inability to languish, appears too regular, a misfit in the line of cinematic loners.

Sanjoy Nag lends an ordinariness to his character and Soni Razdan owns it without devaluing it. She flits between being sombre, petulant, compassionate and jealous and is particularly watchable in her scenes with her tenant (Pankaj Tripathi). She brings forth a playfulness, matching strides with the tenant. Though she remains uneven as the quasi-narrator of the story (she reads letters written to the announcer aloud), the pathos in her eyes fill in the silences like very few things do. She makes loneliness seem both generic and universal and not as the effect of the cause that is solitude.

Nag’s film soars precisely for revealing that it is loneliness that is inherent and infuriatingly constant, that it is not related to waiting for someone and is not dispelled when someone arrives. That it does not succeed a great tragedy and anyone can be and probably is lonely. And the title of the film serves as a comforting, compassionate way of confiding this.