anirbanbanerjee

Film Nirbak has mainly four tales to tell . All of them are striking and their aesthetics is enchanting. All of them are worth reviewing more than once and all of them have their philosophical and ethical narratives on the sleeve. We have perhaps witnessed, in the second story, a contemporary deliberation of the Non- Anthropocentric ethical narrative of nature. And this is rare given that Bengali cinema although was imbibed once in philosophical creativity now only celebrates so called noir normalcy. Films that verge on creative and aesthetic variety that tends to be " non-mainstream " are easily sidelined by constant " mainstream " commercial –purpose –driven media propaganda.

Personification of the old tree and its relation with the lady and her lover is subtle. It requires vision on part of an artist to see what untold .It is requires talent to portray the same through visuals where dialogue plays its part not so much as it does in literature. The tree dreams of fantasies (Freudian ? ) of BDSM and ballerina with the lady . The tree whispers, although the lady can't hear them, the sound is carried by the wind it blows through the tree's branches. What a pity that the tree is immovable but all sorts of motion is played around it in a city that is still grappling with hegemonistic modernity through concrete, luxury cars and cell phones. The boyfriend is a typical smart gadget-money-honey-bunny-job happy self indulged metro dweller for whom life centers around possessions and materials and career and money and of course sex. Modern dreams everyone!! His career interests block way of his love expressions and he brings issues of adjustment, all of them that he sees through his materialistic looking glass. The lady is keen on the relationship but she is attached to the space around her – the space called Calcutta –her city, her moments of liberty and womanhood. Director does divine here to bring forth the tree for bestowing of a divine justice through sequences of funny scenes. Vision and the message is well expressed though. The tree is happy when finally it sees that its love, the lady, is accepted by her boyfriend not as a possession (like movable objects which he can carry from one city to another city catering to his career needs) but with humble mellowing gestures. The boyfriend relinquishes his possessive intentions for his lady love. The tree is now ready to relinquish its short lived affairs for the happiness it knows the lady will get now on. Nature thought about humans, we also think about nature, but do we allow our concerns to accept nature as it is, in its true totality or do we value nature just because our utilitarian intentions have logically prepared us to do so? Are we ready to accept that nature is intrinsically valuable and cautiously wiser than we are. Should we not go to nature , bow down before it with humble disposition deplete ourselves of conscious mental constructs of human superiority and accept that nature is not what we humans would want it to be for our own utilities but an existence intrinsically valuable in itself? Srijit has done great not only aesthetically but also philosophically. Even if this film is not accepted by our regular film critics or if movie watchers avoid this film sniffing at it with anti art -house rhetorical clichés (and by the way this is a new trend amongst our film critics in Bengal to label mega serial type dramas as Films) , still the purported philosophical and ethical quest that this film proposes is going to put this film on world standards.