Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Rituparno's Bonolata...!!

I love films that aesthetically merges the conscious and semi conscious trance of the human psyche..very seldom film makers have explored the terrain of the surreal world..Film maker Rituparno Ghosh has somewhat successfully explored this side with subtlety in his tale of a bored spinster Bonolata in Bariwali (Lady of the house),where the lady's day to day events merges with her dreams,creating a beautiful collage of human emotions,for instance the sequence where she dreams of her wedding day colliding with the rituals(being performed by women folk,along with Prosonno decked up as a lady) following the death of her would be husband bitten by a snake,with the monosha mongol (traditional religious narrative of the goddess of the snakes) playing in the background! After years of living a monotonous life accompanied by a maid servant Malati and an effeminate retainer Prosonno ,she goes through an emotional turmoil with the arrival of a director with his film unit to shoot a film at her spacious ancestral house,she gets emotionally attached to the man,and in her dreams she attains for that physical desire of a married woman,she has been deprived of all these years.In one such dream sequence,she comes to his bedroom decked up as his wife with a glass of milk,asking him the arrival of the month of falgun,in the very next shot,he takes out a tagore's novel and slashes out the glued pages of the book with a knife..stains of blood sprinkles onto her face..the first sign of marital bliss!
In her surreal world,she visualizes the maid 'malati' as a bride specially after she watches her kissing her boyfriend on a storm stuck afternoon which also coincides with the news of malati living the her job as her maid due to her upcoming marriage

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