Love আজ কাল পরশু - a review

 

I loved watching this film Love আজ কাল পরশু (today, tomorrow/yesterday, day after tomorrow) by Pritam D. Gupta for a number of reasons. I will be honest with you I am not a film critic or a professional reviewer, but I am an audience and therefore feel responsible to give my opinion about the film. 

Knee-jerk impression

When I saw the first bit, I switched it off, immediately after the Robindrosongeet sung by Saheb. (তোমায় নতুন করে পাবো বলে); I thought it was a film that was just wanting to be intellectual, one of those wannabees which I get to see these days. I was happy to have changed my decision to continue seeing it after a couple of days. I was overwhelmed with shame on my quick and knee-jerk judgment from the time the film was explained to me, by Paoli Dam, one of the most powerful actresses the Bengali cinema had ever produced. At the end of the film, I realized how brilliantly the song 'তোমায় নতুন করে পাবো বলে' was used in the film. I will also quickly confess what brought me into watching the film again, I asked myself some very stupid questions concerning the pedigree of Arjun, the first being 'can the son of Sabyasachi Chakraborty act in such a senseless film, and the second was even more stupid, can a person well-read actor like Arjun who is also seen with William Dalrymple sign up for a film I had to stop watching; I was happy that these meaningless, illogical questions opened up a new world for me. Pritam, I think, is all set to help us unlearn and relearn about cinema and about good films. 

The striking central plot

Two co-passengers traveling from abroad to India, lucky to survive a crashland, lose their memory. Now it's not temporary amnesia, they lose their memory for good, and a certain director, Paoli Dam, discovers them and takes advantage of this fact, locks them up in a hotel, engages them into a popular TV love serial where they are seen enacting sensuous and erotic love to gain TRPs (Television Rating Point). The characters literally become the puppets in the hands of the director without knowing who they are; their amnesia becomes an advantage for the director who was looking for actors who could forget themselves. In the end, the protagonists choose to be in a state of amnesia for the sake of falling in love again and again. Their other option would be to end up in a hospital where they may or may not be treated for the disease that didn't have a cure. 

This in itself seemed very striking, a theme that needs to be exploited more in our country, in our language. For me, it seemed to be a film which was way beyond its time, maybe we would be able to appreciate films like these two hundred years later.

Black choice, a cul-de-sac, a no exit

The protagonists are the puppets here. This brought to my mind an acclaimed film Nayak, by Ray, where the hero in the reel life was also a real-life hero and where the word 'puppet' was used many times indicating the status of the actors. In this film, the protagonists cannot escape from their situation because when they absconded, they found themselves to be celebrities for reasons they weren't really aware of, so, in a way, they are condemned in a blind lane from where there is no exit, much like Inès and Garcin of Sartre's No exit.

The idea was bought by me

The film, on one hand, explains how ideas about a person, community, situations get embedded in our brains, through our parents, elders, and society that we never apply our sense of judgment to discover the truth ourselves, and on the other, talks about the very concept of acting which, according to the film, is the art of forgetting self. The director was happy for two reasons: 1) she got two persons who could completely forget themselves, and 2) they would remain puppets in her hands. It became clear when the director, Kalki Maitra, asked the most important question 'we who' to the characters who wanted to break free from their state of loss. This 'we who', in my opinion, had a 360-degree alignment because all the characters, including the director Kalki, were constantly changing their roles in the TV serial.

This was laid bare with a foolproof script, screenplay, and direction.

Good and bad

One could argue on the ethics of the director in the film, whether it was justified for her to abuse the characters' pitiful state, but it also allows one to interpret their engagement as lovers as way too exhilarating, an experience of love that could veritably have a healing effect on them?  

S. Tarr

I jumped out of my seat upon hearing the lines of S. Tarr and marveled at the timing of using the lines, minutes before the crashlanding

“Poetry and beauty

are born out of pain.

This is their glory,

this is our gain.”

The clever writer-director Pritam D. Gupta did a wonderful job by justifying the lines of Tarr till the end. Kudos!

Signs of deconstruction

I could sense the craft with which Pritam was trying to establish a relationship between the text and the meaning. As Derrida said, 'il n'y a que texte' (there's nothing but text, the actors acting in the play are also texts. Therefore, it was heartening to watch Kalki say that she was looking for actors who could forget themselves. Fascinating because by so saying she was taking all the actors, the real and the fiction alike into the fold asking them if they (actors of today, tomorrow, and thereafter) could ever be able to forget themselves. Well, I don't know if Paoli, Arjun, Madhumita, Leena were indeed able to forget themselves but they did a wonderfully sincere job in translating the insane ambition of Pritam into fruition. 

Scorecard

I saw some very credible acting from Arjun Chakraborty and Madhumita Sarkar as Avik and Tista, the protagonists of the film, aptly supported by Anindita Bose as Leena, Anirban Chakraborty as Ganesh, Abhijeet Ganguli as the scientist, and excelled by Paoli Dam, the director Kalki Maitra. As I said earlier that I am not a professional reviewer, but, besides being Ray-educated, I have also seen Renoir, Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Béla Tarr, and many Hollywood films. I score an absolute ten on ten to this film and promise to follow Pritam D Gupta until he gets an Oscar for us.