Atanu Ghosh has earned respect for his wonderful telefilms that span a range of themes, plots, subjects and most importantly, issues zeroing in on the complex web of human relationships within a contemporary urban setting. He is low-key and controlled. He does not raise slogans or hold any flag-for-causes aloft. Two of his notable works are Asamapto and Roopkatha Noy. Asamapto explored the delicate area of an Alzheimer’s patient and his brief interaction with an elitist sex-worker. Roopkatha Noy is a beautiful film about a salesman’s wishful thinking of becoming a famous author and his fantasies revolving around the heroine of his stories.

His first full-length feature film, Angshumaner Chhobi, is based on his story written five years ago but shelved for want of a producer. Ghosh has tried to widen the horizons of his cinemascape. He takes it out of television to the world outside, geographically and socially while working within the same framework of a few characters. The narrative runs along three parallel tracks, telescoping into each other to span incidents happening around the same time. The main track is the one that shows Angshuman landing at Calcutta airport back from Italy where he is famous in the documentary genre. He has come to Calcutta with the express purpose of making his first feature film in Bengali, something his professor requested him to do. The second track probes into the film-within-the-film, that includes the uphill climb Angshuman goes through to get his principal cast together, then set them through the paces of their work, and so on. The third track, sort of sandwiched between these two as it involves both these worlds, deals with the police investigation of the mysterious death of a successful businessman who is also the estranged husband of Madhura, the actress who plays one of the two leads in Angshuman’s film. Was the death a murder, or was it suicide?

The four main characters are Angshuman, veteran actor Pradyut Mukherjee who has been drawn out of his self-imposed shell to enact the role of a famous painter who is losing his memory, Madhura Sen, a once-famous-star-now-turned-jatra performer persuaded to perform the role of his semi-literate ayah, and Madhura’s friend Indraneel. There are other offshoots such as Angshuman’s friend and his wife, the police officer and the old actor’s companion.

The main characters, except Angshuman, are social recluses. Pradyut Mukherjee has gone into seclusion for nine long years. He lives in a world of his own, often disturbed by hallucinations of his days in films. The scene where he hallucinates about a familiar make-up man trying to put sideburns on his face only to shake out of the moment is beautiful. His lessons on concentration to Madhura in a rare moment of shared truths, and then testing her with the news story of her link-up with Indraneel is another telling moment. The bitter, cynical Madhura Sen who won the National Award with her debut performance, has been reduced to jatra performances where she is the reigning queen. She was ousted out of the film industry because of her unprofessional attitude and rude behaviour. Her solemn and sad face lights up only when Indraneel calls up or comes over. In a rare moment, she peeps back into a lost childhood she craves for but that is now beyond reach. Yet, as it transpires, she is in love with Indraneel, a male sex worker, but the relationship is untouched by sex. The quiet, beautifully lit birthday scene in Madhura’s apartment is another memorable moment shattered by the police officer’s entry.

This is the first Bengali film in history to feature a gigolo as an important character. Tota Roychoudhury has given an outstanding performance in a role that is soaked in empathy and understanding. However, three questions nag us about this character. One, how does a HIV+ man sustain such a beautifully toned body? Two, if he is such a kind-hearted human being, how does he continue practicing his profession despite the deadly threat he poses to his clients since he dies within six months of his imprisonment? Three, would a person who guards his privacy like a hawk, suddenly decide to confess to a virtual stranger like Angshuman?

By far, this could be one of the best performances of Soumitra Chatterjee who completes 50 years in films in September. His Prodyut Mukherjee vacillates slowly but unsteadily between the character he plays and the man he is in real life, trying to cope with his fears, with ghosts from the past that continue to haunt his present to disturb his future. When Anghsuman’s film ends, Prodyut is back in films. Indrani Haldar is the most versatile actress in Bengali cinema, notwithstanding that mainstream cinema continues to sidetrack her. She can express herself with a mere twitch of a brow or just by throwing a look. Her Madhura Sen stands in complete juxtaposition to Anandi, the ayah she plays in Angshuman’s film, soft, gentle, patient and positive. She is brilliant. One encounters an evolving actor in Bhaskar Banerjee who plays the actor’s understanding companion. Rudraneel Ghosh and Anjana Basu as Angshuman’s friend and his wife, Pijush Ganguly as Madhura’s brother and Bobbyy Chakraborty as the salesman who visits Indraneel in the gym complement the rest of the cast with solid histrionics never mind their brief footage. Ananya Chatterjee as the police officer leaves her hair loose while on duty and looks a bit too glamorous for a police officer. She tries to do justice to a not very well-written role. Indraneel Sengupta as Angshuman is controlled, a bit remote and very good in a debut performance. But the icing on the cake belongs to Sabyasachi Chakraborty who enacts Angshuman’s idealist blind teacher to perfection. It is difficult to believe that this man is not blind.

Sandip Sen’s cinematography challenges the swift editorial changes between and among 18 locations in and out of Kolkata, using darkness to intensify a given scene and making optimum use of an open day in the courtyard scene where Madhura is playing hopscotch with the local kids. The campfire dance sequence with strobe-like effects is a beauty. The best shot scene is towards the end where Anandi dances away in graceful abandon, peeping through the designed openings of the terrace walls, like a delighted little girl. The same goes for art director Joy Chandra Chandra’s precise spotting of the locations, the country house with the brick walls, the steps where Madhura sits to savour the quiet of the night, etc. Rocket Mandal’s musical score could have been a bit more fitting to the somber mood of the film because at times, it sounds a bit too cheerful for the setting.

The pace of the film is too slow in the first half but gains momentum and drama in the second, especially from the point where Angshuman begins to shoot his film. Ghosh’s close attention to the sound design is commendable – the sound of a speeding train in the backdrop, the constant sound of the cranking camera when a scene is being shot to draw that subtle line of difference between the real and the illusionary, the sound of a car braking nearby, are some examples. Sujoy Dutta-Roy’s editing as he flips from one track to another and then to the third is smooth and fluid. Ghosh rightly keeps Madhura’s husband out of the frame from beginning to end and downplays the television hype around the murder. He also reveals the title of Angshuman’s film only in the end to show that his film is in reality, Anandi’s story and not the painter’s who is suffering from dementia.

The two things about Angshumaner Chhobi that haunt you as much as the brilliant story-telling, the magical cinematography and the slow chemistry between and among the characters are – firstly, the actual film that Angshuman is making does not really look like an earth-shaking attempt at cinematic self-expression to make an impact on the audience, short-term or long-term. It is after all, just a story of two dissimilar and lonely souls who are thrown together by force of circumstance or twist of fate. That is all there is to the film-within-the-film. Secondly, having to justify Indraneel’s choice of vocation with the story of a sad childhood fragmented by his parents’ divorce is totally uncalled for. Not all characters need to be justified and should simply be for their own sakes. All said and done, there are lapses in logic within the narrative of the film. There is no lapse in the language of cinema or in its aesthetics.

“Can all relationships be defined?” asks Angshuman at one point in the film. This is the bottom-line of Angshumaner Chhobi. It is the ideology on which the film is based and the message it tries to get across. And he does it very well indeed.