The Last Lear has precious little to do with Shakespeare’s original play. It has to do with an actor’s tragedy of having to bow out much before his time has come. It has to do with having to walk out just before he was to enact the dream character of his life – King Lear. It has to do with the tragedy of being mercilessly exploited by his director for his first, and as it turns out, last screen role. But like King Lear, The Last Lear is a brutal film, and one unwittingly begins to draw parallels between the King Lear and Harish Mishra aka Harry, a victim of his emotional vulnerability that draws him to perform for a medium he has little respect for, just because he begins to believe in a friendship that never was. Like King Lear, the film is filled with human cruelty and a meaningless disaster. The tragedy of Harish Mishra raises the obvious question - whether there is any possibility of justice in the world, or whether the world is fundamentally indifferent and even hostile to humankind, the ‘world’ here represented by Siddharth.

The audience’s introduction to the once-famous Shakespearian stage actor Harry is through large posters of the only film he has ever acted in. The name of the film is Mask, with a tagline that reads "because faces often lie." The camera intercuts glossy shots of the premiere with shots of a darkened apartment in some forgotten Kolkata street. Shabnam, the lead actress of the film who has decided not to go to the premiere, has come to visit Harry, paralysed during an accident on the last day of the shoot in Mussoorie. Vandana, disgusted with the indifference of the film fraternity to Harry’s accident and its aftermath, is not happy to see her. The attending nurse is waiting for the boyfriend to pick her up. Vandana picks up shreds of memories of and with Harry and the film begins to get into the past-present mode Ghosh seems to have made his structural signature.

Interestingly, Ghosh has created Gautam, a media person writing a book on the making of the film, a close friend of Siddharth who doubles up as the voice-over and anchor of the story. Gautam is not a neutral and unbiased voice-over though. He spikes his story telling with moral comments on what transpired between Siddharth and Harish, what led to the accident and why, and how he lost a close friend in Siddharth after Harish’s accident. Gautam raises questions about the ‘realism’ that lies behind the ‘mask’ of realistic cinema, the price a ‘committed’ filmmaker is ready to pay to get that ‘real’ shot for his ‘real’ film, and then forget all about the actor who made this ‘realism’ possible. He also takes potshots at this ‘committed’ director’s clever strategy of drawing media mileage out of the accident for the publicity, marketing and release of Mask. Ghosh’s courage in peeling the mask off ‘creative commitment’ of ‘realistic’ filmmakers is commendable. Jishu Sengupta, mellowing rapidly, delivers a seamlessly natural performance.

Ghosh tries his best to hide the screen charisma of Amitabh Bachchan with a get-up that makes Bachchan look his ugliest. His long salt-and-pepper hair hangs loose around his head, his horsy face wears a perpetual look of arrogance in anger, in pain and in good cheer. What is left of a once-famous stage persona is his stylized body language and speech, peppered with so much Shakespeare that poor Gautam is forced to beat a hasty retreat when he cannot identify lines from The Tempest on his first encounter with the strange man. Bachchan has played a very complex and perhaps, the most difficult role of his career, having had to put in more homework that he needs to do for his other screen roles. His stylized body language, his booming voice that delivers ordinary lines with the same stylistic approach he uses for his Shakespeare, the wave of his hands, his trying to shoo away the pissing passer-by, his use of the unusual doorbell, are done in the way only Bachchan can and he does it with aplomb. It must have been difficult to act theatrical for an actor known for his natural performances.

The closed circuit television set Siddharth installs in Harry’s apartment is a post-Modernist touch. It is characterized by the basic elements of post-modernism - (a) the disappearance of a sense of history, (b) entrapment in a perpetual present and (c) the loss of temporal referents. As the two watch street scenes in Black-and-White on the television screen and play a guessing game of who-is-who-going-where-doing-what, the television screen becomes a window to the outer world for Harry who has lived all his years immersed in a world closeted with Shakespeare. It is much later that one learns the diabolic purpose with which Siddharth manipulated this ‘bonding.’ Arjun Rampal’s Siddharth is an illustration in understatement, disguising his cruelty with the niceties that spell out the difference between acting on the stage and screen that Harry is doing and acting in real life, an art Siddharth has mastered.

The interiors of Harry’s apartment, with a big close-up of Bachchan’s face framed in an old Black-and-White photograph, carry the hangover of colonial remnants of a past life. But Harry disappears from this scene once he begins to shoot for the film. In the present time, as he lies paralysed in his bedroom, the three women, Shabnam, the star who neither looks nor acts like one, Vandana, the live-in partner and Ivy, the nurse, share thoughts and discover the lowest common denominator women's lives can easily be reduced to by the men they love. Ghosh does not forget his commitment to the woman’s cause. The three women are distanced in every which way – lifestyle, vocation, age, education and social status. But they are united through and in their sufferings arising from love. They share their personal stories intercut with Vandana’s backtracking into her life with Harry, punctuated with sound metaphors – the sound of the doorbell each time making Ivy sit up in suspense, the sound of Diwali crackers being lit all around, the ring of the telephone and the repeated rings on Shabnam’s cell-phone. Preity Zinta, seen for the first time on screen in a sari and also in a demurely wrapped salwar-kameez, looks not too good but does justice to the rather sketchy Shabnam. Divya Dutt, a strong woman forced to look weak, fills Ivy with the diffidence of uncertainty and the strength of speaking home truths. But the cake among this woman-trio must go to Shefali Shah as Vandana who makes the most of the character Ghosh has written for her. But why is she wearing such an expensive sari and a thick gold bala that do not belong to her obviously impoverished lifestyle?

Abhik Mukherjee's cinematography – at the lush premiere, inside the apartment, on the streets within the studio as the film is being shot and on location in Mussoorie defies description, so magical is his use of strategic lighting that sheds light on just the right nuances on Harry’s face as it shoots the sick Harry in the dark in the closing frames of the film. The details within the apartment and in the Black-and-White shots seen from the close-circuit television set have to be seen to be believed and the production designer too deserves a pat on his back. However, Harry belting out Shakespeare in the end is a cinematic cliché not expected from Ghosh.

The Last Lear is for a very niche audience. It is in English. It presumes an audience familiar with Shakespeare in general and King Lear in particular. It does not have the screen persona of Bachchan we are used to. And it is a very dark film without relief. It offers the rainbow at the end of that dark tunnel, but takes a rickety ride on a long journey to reach there. Yet, it is a watch-worthy film. In the end, for those conversant with King Lear, it is like Gautam taking on the voice of Gloucester in King Lear to say, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,” pointing out that it is foolish for humankind to assume that the natural world works in parallel with socially or morally convenient notions of justice.