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Anuranan (2006) Director: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury Cast: Rahul Bhose, Rituparna Sengupta, Raima Sen, Rajat Kapoor Time: 113 min. Bengali with English subtitles Rating: |
Bengali art films can be challenging to watch. They move a grass-growingly slow pace, toss around abstract ideas, and present everything in elaborate metaphors. This approach can make them some of the most brilliant cinema ever, but Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Anuranan doesn’t fall into this category. Inept screenwriting and directing just make it ridiculously tedious.
Anuranan begins in London with Rahul (Bhose), a British born Indian with a zest for life, receiving a promotion that allows him and wife Nandita (Sengupta) to return to Calcutta, where they had met and married. We learn that they married because Nandita became pregnant, but she later miscarried, which prevents her from conceiving again. Being a forever childless couple throws Nandita into fits of depressions and pushes Rahul to devote himself to his job.
Once in Calcutta, they befriend Rahul’s work colleague Amit (Kapoor) and his wife Preeti (Sen). Amit emerges as a straightforward, money-obsessed brute, while Preeti reveals herself as a timid, sensitive wife waiting to experience the passion she read about in books. Preeti becomes drawn to Rahul with his passion for life, and they soon develop a close friendship.
This plot suggests many intriguing possibilities, but the screenplay, co-written by director Chowdhury, proves too incompetent to offer anything of substance or realism. The screenplay contains numerous structural and writing problems: unnecessary scenes, meaningless dialogues, immature characters, a cop-out plot twist, and overall inept storytelling.
The problems begin with the movie opening in London. The London scenes take up the first quarter of the film, and they serve no purpose. The film could have opened in Calcutta without any loss of detail or information.
While in London, Rahul has a conversation with an English female coworker, and this scene exists only to explain, through artificial and stilted dialogue, that Rahul and Nandita once lived in Calcutta, that they lost a child, and that they fled Calcutta to escape the emotional pain of losing that child. Any skilled storyteller would have revealed these details less directly. Plus, this is a movie—details should be shown through flashbacks, not told in dialog.
Other pointless scenes appear throughout the movie. We endure a farewell dinner for Rahul in London. We see Nandita at her teaching job. We watch Amit verbally abusing Preeti because he locked an important business file in a closet and lost his keys. (Why would he lock an important document in the closet anyway?) We watch as Preeti has her friend anonymously call Rahul and set up a blind meeting so she can see him. (Are these people still in high school?)
The dialogues in many of the scenes are equally pointless and often childish. They don’t reveal the characters as much as they reveal Chowdhury’s own inexperience interacting with people, particularly women. As a screenwriter, he has no concept of how people engage each other, verbally, emotionally, or psychologically.
Every time the characters have an opportunity to say something important or to address some conflict in their relationships, the script shifts into purple prose laden with grand metaphysical metaphors that say absolutely nothing. As a result, the characters never say anything meaningful to each other or communicate a useful thought or emotion.
The origins of this useless metaphysical babble can be traced to the “concept” that inspired the film. In Bengali, anuranan means “resonance,” and Chowdhury’s concept, as he explains on the film’s web site, is that a relationship between two people creates a chord that resonates between them and throughout their lives.
(What is he really trying to say? Some people connect, some don’t, and how you respond to that connection or lack of connection has consequences. He obviously considers the inability to communicate in plain language a personality trait his characters should share with him.)
Of course, following through with this concept of resonance requires a complexity the film is incapable of achieving. It would require a sense of realism and action strangely absent in the script—Rahul and Nandita would talk about seeking in vitro treatments or adopting a child, Amit and Raima would have an honest discussion about why they ever got married, and Rahul and Preeti would end up in bed and divorce their spouses.
Instead, the characters live in stasis, simply continuing with their dysfunctional lives without making any effort to change. Actually, Chowdhury ignores the dysfunctional relationships in his film—probably because he hasn’t the slightest idea how to address them as a storyteller or how to portray them as a filmmaker.
His inability to present relationships realistically lies in his lofty theme. The metaphysical nonsense about resonance is a nice concept, but like all abstracts, it has no bearing on reality. Despite what Chowdhury would like us to believe, resonance as a theory does nothing to resolve the problems his characters or real people experience.
The final unexpected plot twist—unexpected because it’s so amateurish you would never expect a serious storyteller to actually incorporate it into a plot—only adds to the story’s dissonance. It shatters the characters’ lives, without allowing them to grow or giving them any insight whatsoever.
But resonance has no connection to growth or insight, and this leads to the film’s final failure. A story should have its characters evolve in some way. Without this change, no story has truly been told. For this reason, Anuranan reveals itself as a debut film from a writer-director who has no ability to tell a story, and it’s so discordant you will leave the theater wondering why it was ever made.
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