One may say that a good film director is a sugarman of the soul for his audience. When a cinema finds vision in its construct and narratives, it is often apparent how consumption of the attributes in its form and content finds its own voice. The impact and sustainability of this often qualifies the director's 'cut'.
Talking about Indrasis's 'The Parcel', I am strongly reminded of these characteristics and the becoming of his tread in this journey. This is existentially a socio-psychological nuance, in the realm of dark romanticism...the ethos of urban quaker. The objectivity underlying recurrent receipt of parcels from an unknown sender in a medical couple's family gradually unfolds into subjective torrents and tempest of inner and outer make of a man and woman. These take diverse routes yielding diverse behaviors, tending to converge often reluctantly, on a tea-table called home. Then there are new and old beginnings - perpetual hints of parallel or consequential events and escapades and fruitless aspirations to stitch the frays.
The director has swept his wand with characteristic élan and equanimity. The cinematic language has been well-trodden, manifest even to an uninitiated reviewer like me. The form, content, music, experiments with script forms and shot forms, audio and visual editing and the overall cinematic narrative have surely marked this film as another phenomenal direction from the house of Indrasis, after 'Bilu Rakkhosh' and 'Pupa'.
I was recently reading through an obituary of late maestro Buddhadeb Dasgupta by another stalwart director who talked about the passion to understand the inner nature of a human - individualistic or collective. It is often the overlapping orbits of diverse layers of balance that humans dynamically reside in. The chemistry is complex. Our young director of 'The Parcel' boldly explores this mist with a promising trademark of his own.
