Synopsis
Mridula Chatterjee is an independent, dedicated, sixty-four year old widow who runs her NGO for people with disabilities in Kolkata. Her young grandson, Rohan, who she has brought up single-handedly, is about to come home for his vacations from law school in Bangalore. When Rohan asks her if she has ever been in love, Mridula is forced to take a flashback into her past that brings up many unpleasant and shocking truths about her lost love, her widowhood, her love-hate relationship with her daughter Palash, and the tragedy of loneliness though it has been of her choice. Memories that had long remained confined within the recesses of her heart come up, raising questions on the tragedy of having loved and lost, of having lost out on motherhood even while being a mother and of having to hide one of the biggest secrets about Palash – the truth of her paternity.
Author, journalist, editor and filmmaker Jayabrato Chatterjee comes back to direction after a long hiatus of 22 years since he made his first film Kehkesha, a film that vanished without creating so much as a ripple. The magic of cinema sucked him back into the vortex of filmmaking resulting in Lovesongs - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, based on his own story and script. A subplot from ‘yesterday’ that haunts Mridula’s ‘today’ is her love for Aftab Jaffrey, who she could not marry for political reasons and also because of the difference in their faith. The ‘tomorrow’ is comprised of Rohan, son of the dead Palash who listens to the tragic story of his mother from his grandmother.
The first thing that strikes a discordant note about Lovesongs - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is its choice of language – English. There is a smattering of Bengali too, but the main language of the film is English. So what’s new? The story, the characters, the ambience placed in a Kolkata setting is too ‘Bengali’ for the film to lend itself to English as the lingua franca. Agreed, that the contemporary urban Bengali carries an overload of English with him all the time. Agreed, that English widens the canvas of the film to include an international audience. But one feels that had the director chosen Bengali, the film might have been warmer. Somehow, there is this feeling of alienation the film exudes not when you walk out of the theatre, but when you reflect on it at leisure.
The mother-daughter relationship in cinema continues to provide a rich seam of source material for filmmakers. A wide range of cinematic languages and genres, from fictional narratives through dramatised documentary to experimental and avant-garde forms, to explore questions of identity have been deployed by filmmakers time and again to portray this. In Unishe April, Rituparno Ghosh tried to free the censored and distorted image of the screen mother from the taboos and constraints of patriarchal culture to place it as a subject of psychological study. In Sardari Begum, Shyam Benegal is open about Sardari’s brutal repression of her daughter’s love life. He does not make any attempt to whitewash her character. Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978) starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman remains the best celluloid statement on the mother-daughter relationship till date.
 Though
Mridula is the central character in the film,
it is her daughter Palash who adds life to it.
The entry of Palash within the flashback makes
the sedate and quiet film suddenly take on a pulsating,
throbbing life of its own, culminating, albeit,
in tragedy when she dies in a freak road accident.
With her volatile nature, her anger, her desperate
hunger to be loved by a mother she thinks has
no time for her, Palash defines an ironical counterpoint
to her quiet, focussed and independent mother
who shuns things and people who threaten her independence.
Palash turns out to become everything her mother
is not and did not want her to be. Palash becomes
a crooner at a nightclub Kolkata’s Park
Street and marries its drummer Dev, each action
expressing her rebellion against the mother on
the one hand and her desperate attempt to draw
her attention on the other. Each time Palash returns
to her mother after being bashed up by a confused
husband who seems to love her too, the mother
is too aloof, too alienated even to stretch out
a hand and place it on her anguished daughter’s
head. A chance encounter with between Aftab and
Mridula in another city where Mridula goes to
do research on the Santhals, throws up the unhappiness
of his childless marriage to the beautiful and
alcoholic Rabea. Palash who arrives suddenly in
search of her mother, is shocked to find her mother
staying in the house of her previous lover, misunderstands
the scenario and drives off to a tragic death.
There is a touching moment where a pained Palash
rests her head on her mother’s shoulder,
waiting to be touched and patted. The mother stretches
out her hand hesitantly, but then withdraws it.
Does Mridula mend fences with Aftab to begin life
anew? Was Palash’s death a suicide, an accident
or a result of willful neglect by a mother whose
priorities lay elsewhere in her commitment to
a society much larger than the framework of her
immediate family? Or, does she die of shock when
she learns the truth of her birth? Some answers
are there in the film while some are left to the
audience to find out.
Jayabrato’s script is tightly knit and
he has rightly controlled the footage within the
time-span of 95 minutes of screening time. However,
his whitewashing of Mridula’s character
whose narration to Rohan is more an act of purging
herself of feelings of guilt rather than telling
him the sad story of his mother is too far-fetched
and biased in her favour, thus putting her daughter’s
pain in the shade. Though Jayabrato keeps insisting
that his aim was to explore human relationships
in all its magic colours, he allows himself to
be drawn away from what really had immense possibilities
– the many layers hidden between the mother-daughter
relationship, unwritten, unsaid but understood.
Shabana Chatterjee makes a brilliant debut performance as the restive, disturbed, desperate Palash pitted against the low-key acting of Jaya Bachchan. June Malliah as Ketaki is beautifully subtle and controlled but Mallika Sarabhai as Aftab Jaffrey’s alcoholic and chronically depressed wife sticks out like a sore thumb while Om Puri has little scope. Doel Basu as Tara is efficiently adequate.
Shot in Kolkata, Lovesongs - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow meanders along the cityscape in a laidback, leisurely way, capturing the beauty of its parks and monuments, to move into a Park Street nightclub and then wander away to a distant city where Mridula comes face-to-face with a slice of her past. The deceptive beauty of the city is a veil that hides the ugly face of frustration, disillusionment and death in the central story marking the brilliance of Soumik Haldar’s cinematography. Dialogues are straightforward and to the point, veering away from innuendo and verbal subterfuge except when Rabea makes her alcoholic presence strongly felt.
What you really carry with you out of the theatre is the wonderful musical score by Usha Uthup whose theme music is a carry over of the long-lost Tagore song Shedin Dujone Dulechhinu Bone in Pilu raag. Two traditional ghazals, one penned by Mir Taqui Mir and the other by Momin Khan Momin are rendered soulfully by Jojo are striking in their originality and there is the English rendering of Ekla Cholo re by Usha herself. The old Patta Patta Boota Boota from Ek Nazar and Uthup’s signature style of Latino, jazz and the Blues in the couple of English songs makes music one of the strongest characters in the film. It defines the emotional and geographical ambience of the film and makes the characters stand out in relief.
See our preview of the film.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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