Real Aesthete

WHEN you are hemmed in by two greats, you have to summon all the talent at your command and make a desperate attempt to strike par. And when...

WHEN you are hemmed in by two greats, you have to summon all the talent at your command and make a desperate attempt to strike par. And when you try too hard, you can overreach yourself. Your art can be lured into speaking not the experienced truth but what you think should be the truth. In his long career spanning five decades, Mrinal Sen8217;s filmmaking occasionally suffered from these moments of delusion, of saying things that his camera did not believe in. But you cannot really blame him; he had to contend with Satyajit Ray8217;s classical vision and Ritwik Ghatak8217;s vibrant lenses.

This year8217;s nominee for the Dadasaheb Phalke award has always been the most restless of the trio and probably the one with the maximum urge to relate to his immediate environment. In the late Sixties, before he entered that phase of celluloid anarchy, he magically produced the haunting Bhuvan Shome, a lucid, lilting portrayal of a proud, elderly widower8217;s innocent relationship with a village girl. Bhuvan Shome was simply sublime8212;an extraordinary film from someone whose realism was sometimes degenerating into sloganeering.

Looking back, Sen was immersed in experimenting with form. Ray had chosen the classical style of storytelling with intelligent but8212;in his later life 8212;predictable camera angles. Ghatak believed in screens throbbing with emotions, at times with melodrama. Sen was the least stable of them all. From the staccato he moved to smoother narrative styles. He waved placards, borrowed a touch of Brechtian alienation from the contemporary stage and dismantled that comforting sense of illusion. Probably, there was no simpler way in which Sen could have constructed his Calcutta trilogy8212;Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik. Those were dangerous times; there was so much violence and morbidity.

SEN had the guts to take risks. His greatness lies in his ability to bounce back. He reinvents his cinema when he gifts two immensely memorable productions8212;Ekdin Pratidin and Kharij The Case is Shut. In these two films, Sen puts his middle class sensibility on trial. He faces his own roots as a Bengali bhadralok. Ekdin Pratidin deals with the problem of a working girl returning home late. Kharij is a sensitive study of a middle class family having to handle the accidental death of their domestic help.

And of the three greats, it was left to Sen to find out if Bengal could be linked cinematically with the rest of India. His Telegu film, Oka Uri Katha or his Oriya film, Matira Manisha illustrates how he tried to break down the frontiers of the spoken word. Not just Bhuvan Shome, he excelled in another Hindi film, the nostalgia-steeped Khandahar.

The complaint against Sen, 81, is that he did not always fulfill what he promised. A third Hindi film, Ek Din Achanak could not really build a classic around the family of a man who had disappeared. Neither did Genesis sincerely unravel the roots of a triangular relationship. Mrigaya with debutant Mithun Chakraborty went a distance, but not too far.

Sen chose not to be a cardholder but retained a lifelong friendship with the Left. It is this fierce sense of creative independence that has kept him going from Raatbhor in 1955.

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Some critics have accused him of being a trophy-hunter at the international festivals. For those who have known his honest confusions, this is the unkindest of cuts. His film career may have floundered on occasions but never because of a 8216;8216;disconnect8217;8217; with his reality. Mrinal Sen is8212;he remains8212;a very real man.