Akaler Sandhane

'Aakaler Sandhane' (In Search of Famine) to my mind is one of the best films Mrinal Sen ever made. His superb touch, some puckish humour and sense of drama is backed up by some wonderful acting. No wonder this film simply ran away with every award in India and the Silver Bear in Berlin.

The story is about a film company which sets out to make a film on the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. They select a village in rural Bengal for outdoor shooting and start work. The story weaves around the trials of the troupe in the village.

To me, the best part of the film is the way Mrinal Sen interlaces three distinct themes. The first is the superficial story of the film company and the difficulties they face. The second is the class distinctions conservatism and prejudices that permeates village society and the third is a scathing criticism that 50 years after independence, stark poverty still exists and famine still stalks the land.

Akaler Sandhane (AS2) was released nearly a decade after Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket (AS1) . There are a number of clues to help the viewer connect the two films, and read its message hidden between the lines; but for that, it is necessary to re-watch AS1 after AS2.

Early in AS2, a character says that the bamboo groves remind him of Pather Panchali. For any cinephile, it's fleeting invitation to recall Ray's work, specifically AS1, the only other significant film on the Bengal Famine of '43. Later, Dhritiman's character is annoyed that an actor has shaped her eyebrows, and admonishes her for being insincere. In another scene, a young woman, fan-girling over the "real" Soumitra Chatterjee, asks the "director" why the the great actor wasn't part of his project.

It is worth noting that by the time Soumitra Chatterjee took part in AS1, he was already a mega star, having taken part in over 40 popular films. Mrinal Sen must have watched Soumitra Chatterjee's stellar presence, and Babita's immaculately shaped eyebrows in a closeup of the harrowing climax in AS1, and mused how easily the veneer of the "real" breaks and exposes the "make-believe" underneath.

In fact Sen constantly plays with this idea of "real" and "make believe" with wit and satire. Smita Patil's character breaks down convincingly in front of the camera, but the audience is aware it is make-believe, because they see the camera and hear the director's running instructions on how to feel. In contrast, Durga's the emotions are real and present. Smita Patil snaps out of her character in the very next scene, but Durga can't. The viewer also becomes aware of the Sen casting choice for Durga, who genuinely looks rural and of low-caste, relative to Ray's casting of Chhutki, who glaringly does neither.

It may be a stretch to see Dhritiman's character, the high-intellect, charming, urbane, privileged "director" to be modelled after Ray. He is an outsider in a real village, with his imported classicist and humanist morality, searching for something that is staring right in the face.

I love Ray's work; his art, literature, music, and of course films, and until now, never got into Mrinal Sen's films. But with AS2, i'm beginning to appreciate Mrinal Sen's iconoclastic, provocative rebellious art. How fascinating!

I watched this film with a lot of expectations. Maybe that is why now i feel kind of dissapointed. Don't get me wrong. It is an excellent film by its own merit. There is no doubt about it. It has a a unique 'film within a film' premise. It tries to focus on one of the the darkest corners of bengal history. There is also a ' art vs reality' vibe undercurrent here. Moreover it has a political element. The director tried to shed light on the class struggle between the proletariats and the elite and how it may have a role in engendering famine. This film deals with so many serious issues that it cannot help but be preachy at times. Especially the local school headmaster character and his sermons feel kind of forced. Look, i get the points the director wanted to make but in doing so, he sacrificed a good deal of spontaneity. That is my nitpick about the whole film. If it were less preachy and more spontaneous, then it would definitely make a more pround impression on me

"Cut!, Cut!, Cut!, Cut!" One of the remarkable scenes of the movie is a group of village boys running after the film crew bus shouting and mocking the way the director officially ends a shot. It is apparently, not much and only a 5 sec shot. However, 5 sec is long enough for people like Mrinal Sen to turn an innocent childish errant into much more purposeful. The word symbolically sharply demarcates between what is it in the movie and what is in the reality. The film crew was shooting famine which should have ended with the utterance of "cut" yet it leaks into the other side of the camera even though half century has passed since then and India supposedly progressed a lot. It is a slap and a mockery on the failure of the system done in the most subtle way. If a 5 sec shot can communicate all these, then think of what the full movie can do?

Famine is not about lack of food but it also about lack of morality rather the breakdown of values. Famine unleashes the dormant opportunist in the most corrupt and bigot way. Yet amongst such devastation there could be island, there could be people who despite of the hardship can still be empathetic, can still be humane. The movie is reap with many such examples. That's the reason it is a humanistic movie as Mrinal Sen himself is humanistic intellectual.

Unlike his contemporaries, his movies often end without a definite answer and leave the audience guessing. It is a bold experimentation to deliver a scratching message. The striking characteristic of "Akaler Sandhaney" is also that the making of the movie itself and the process of story telling is done in the most informal way. To the audience it it is more a like documentary capturing a set of unrelated events that happened to a film crew than a a feature film itself. His movies is mainly a feast for the mind, appealing and engrossing to your intellect and less so to your senses.

It has an additional value that it is only handful of movies that reminds us of the 1943 Bengal famine where 5 million people just perished due to lack of food (as mentioned in this movie itself)

Dhirtiman, Smita Patil and Rajen Torofdar (Himself a great director) all deserve special mention without which this review will be incomplete.

A must for the film school

Just adding what I inferred as the message of the movie (Caveat: I am not an avid film buff and see very few movies in a year. So my interest and exposure to films is limited. This may be considered before the reader takes any of my ratings/comments/reviews seriously. Given this rider, I am open to correction anytime by anyone.)

The film tries to convey the message that there is often thin and blurred line between fiction and reality.

In the movie, the villagers fear that playing the role of a 'fallen woman' would make a woman a 'fallen woman' in the eyes of society (the villagers).

Similarly the film crew is insensitive to the villagers need and does not think it is creating a 'famine' by taking away the village produce for its own extravagant consumption.