Mohan Rakesh’s Ashaadh Ka Ek Din has served as a stencil for many stories about love, ambition and regret. Sarthak Dasgupta’s Music Teacher (on Netflix) is also a retelling of that familiar story of a romantic, Himalayan idyll interrupted by ambition, with a gender switch thrown in.
There are also traces of A Star is Born without the fatalistic darkness. The story of a mentor left in the shadows while the protege grows beyond the audience of one to dazzle the world , is not full of surprises.
What does linger in memory is the atmospheric palette of pine and fir forests, bridges suspended between the past and the present, chai stalls drenched in rain, narrow streets with hand painted signs and the heart- filling immensity of the hills twinkling with a million drops of light at night. Kaushik Mondal’s camera breathlessly sweeps across both the expanse of misty valleys and the intimacy of a small town wrapped up in wistful conversations about what could have been.
In the end, it is this waft of the unspoken and the unlived and the echoes of yet another night of regret (Phir wohi raat hai sung evocatively as a nod to both RD Burman and to unfinished business) that makes this film a pervasive experience. That and the fullness of a time interrupted by digital intrusions. And steeped in the longing for conversations on a hill side bench and the nostalgia for an all too fleeting youth . And loss not just of that youth but of innocence.
Manav Kaul’s Beni da is from a time when songs were personal and every experience indelible and he transitions to middle-age when days blur into years, the future fades and the past grows more and more alive.
Kaul plays Beni da without any intention to be liked or to be admired. He is flawed, weak and often stuttering between sudden flashes of bravado and habitual ennui. But it is his deep, unrelenting regret and his futile attempts to ignore the past that make him real. He is not a heroic man. He is , what they call in today’s parlance, a runner.A man who runs from love when it is offered but wants it, when it is no longer there. The romanticisation of the act of waiting at a bridge for eight years is all he is capable of . Not living a full life or the risk of taking chances. He also represents the conflict between art and populism. Between those who can spend a lifetime correcting a “sur” and those who find fame but not fulfilment. Kaul is pitch perfect even though his character isn’t.
There is nothing new about a woman choosing love over ambition in our cinema right from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha and Abhiman and our stories always seem to suggest that a woman can either have love or success. Never both and it would have been interesting to see Amrita Bagchi’s Jyotsna with more volition over her choices. First, it is her mentor and then her parents who do the choosing and in the end, there is nothing left to choose from. Bagchi though is convincingly naive and world weary in the two halves of the story. Beni ‘s sister is another filmy trope..chirping solicitously , her life not independent but arranged into safe domesticity by her family. Neena Gupta too has not very much to do.
The most memorable character is that of Divya Dutta who sums up the theme of the film with, “Rishte zabardasti jode ja sakte hain..dil nahin.”
Her Geeta is someone who has more gumption than even the two protagonists because as she says, “Main hamesha dil ki sunti hoon.” But she fails to find love in a marriage she did not choose or with a man she did choose but who cannot love her back. Unlike Beni da, she knows how to move on. And without regret or bitterness. Be it from her husband who found love with another woman or from her own heartbreak. In a smashing scene, she does the last rites of her father-in-law and responds to the veiled warning that it is inauspicious for women to be responsible for perhaps the moksha of a man. She circles the pyre and says, “Bhugatne ke liye tayyar hoon.” It is this readiness for life, for death, for joy and pain that makes her the unsung hero of the film though it is the other two who had a better shot at happiness.
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.