A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .

A COLLAGE OF CINEMA PART 1

I share my thoughts here on some fine works highlighting the realistic alchemy of contemporary Indian cinema, with actor TANISHTHA CHATTERJEE, a rallying figure for quality over the years and one I hugely admire , featuring in all of them. It is a genuine treasure trove implying how much of the good work put forward by consummate artists needs to be discovered anew.

Read this and share your thoughts.

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ISLAND CITY(2016)

ISLAND CITY is about the warped and sometimes liberating ways in which technology controls us. The inertia of darkness as regards humans who are insulated and occupy micro worlds within MUMBAI, the maximum city, is the core function of this tripartite. They are all suppressed by certain standards of being, repressed by limited choices and really have no voice or even any given opportunity to speak out. AMRUTA SUBHASH as the housewife inured to mundanity, VINAY PATHAK as another cog in the wheel of a robotic corporate enterprise and TANISHTHA CHATTERJEE as a factory worker who is arrested by the inferiority complex of her skin colour are hemmed in by the ironic silences throbbing louder than what the big city syndrome of constant noise would have us believe.

The housewife and her family's reverence for a soap opera and its parallels with her husband's absence from home, the office employee's day out as an incentive for his outstanding performance and the poor girl's dreams being forecasted by a mysterious figure : these are not BLACK MIRROR like situations but the payoff in each of the three tales are threaded by a preceding emotional lacuna and the ending is not so much abrupt as much as a humane and in one instance grim portrayal of crushing everyday lives that go under the radar in the great Arabian saga of Bombay nagariya (city)

Uttara Baokar as the senior prefect of the home in the first tale is another winning aspect of ISLAND CITY that marks a first for its director. I could feel the drone of the everyday buzzing in these ultimately humane explorations of people who have lost the battle with other beings owing to social neglect and in the one alternative in virtual means find themselves an oasis to build up some foundation of self hood. Until it crumbles before its due date. Watch this one.

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PARCHED(2016)

The underage widow, the childless outcast, the woman of the night - three stereotypes that every backwater would be more than willing to exploit in a conservative hot-spot of male dominion. They appear not as statistics here. These are the crises that separate the three women and at the same time integrate them with their skewed social structure. Their present conditions are natural to them. The world weighs them in hypocritical equations, a strain that sometimes goes proportional to their bond.