Meghe Dhaka Tara

The independence of India in August 1947 resulted in the partition of Bengal, a trauma etched in the minds of the people whose lives were changed forever. Nowhere is this upheaval better portrayed than in the films of Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak. An active Marxist who began his career in the Communist People's Theater, Ghatak's films never achieved widespread popularity but he is now considered to be one of the top Indian directors of the last half of the 20th century. His best known film, The Cloud-Capped Star, the first in a trilogy examining the economic effects of partition, is a powerful story about a young Indian women who sacrifices her education and marriage in order to hold her family together. Ghatak's inspiration for the character was a woman he saw at a bus stop whose beaten down appearance struck him as being typical of Bengali refugees.

Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) is the youngest daughter of a refugee family from East Pakistan who lives in a middle class home near Calcutta. Neeta is a college student whose brother Shankar (Anil Chaterjee) is a layabout, an aspiring singer who lives off the family while practicing his art and dreaming of a career on the concert stage. Neeta believes in her brother and loves him deeply but has to constantly fend off the complaints of both parents about his laziness. Neeta also has an attractive sister Gita (Gita Ghatak) and a brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) who is also a promising student.

When her father (Bijon Battacharya) has a serious accident, Neeta is forced to give up her studies and find a job and Mantu gives up school to work in a factory. The father is dismayed by a world that no longer has a place for poetry or idealism and falls into a state of hopelessness. Neeta is a good-hearted young woman, but one who fails to consider her own needs and puts off plans for marriage with Sanat (Niranjan Ray), an intellectual studying for a Phd. Sanat, unwilling to wait for her, becomes infatuated with Neeta's sister Gita and they marry to Neeta's dismay. Even though Shankar eventually finds success in Bombay, Neeta's strain in having to hold the family together leads to serious illness and the family's burdens only increase.

The Cloud-Capped Star is an angry film and often bleak, but sudden bursts of sitar music and joyous singing by Shankar lighten the tone. Although the film can be overly melodramatic and unevenly acted, it contains an overriding humanism that is reminiscent of Satyajit Ray and the neo-realist films of the 40s and 50s. Ghatak's raw passion and compelling characters make it easy to overlook its flaws and the result is a tribute to the human spirit and a deeper understanding of the tragedy that partition brought to India.

If Satyajit Ray is the virtuoso of Indian cinema, Ghatak is the maverick. His films aren't as polished or subtle as Ray's, but he takes bold chances. Most blatantly in the sound design, with startling (and often beautiful) use of music, ambient noise, reverb, and effects that are almost sci-fi. Perhaps only Lynch is as distinctive in the employment of audio techniques. Not all of Ghatak's gambles pay off. Take, for instance, his insistence on casting the goofy Bijon Bhattacharya in most of his films. Bhattacharya's performance here isn't quite as damaging as his turn in THE GOLDEN THREAD, but it's easily the weakest aspect of the film. However, the primary focus is on Nita (Supriya Choudhury), the girl whose family walks all over her, and resent her for it in the process. As her brother chides her: "You'll suffer. Those who suffer, suffer forever." The family is a microcosm of Ghatak's obsession, the damage caused by the Partition, commenting on those who exploit the weak, and those who let themselves be exploited. It's high melodrama, but like Sirk, is done so artfully and effectively that it's a wonder to behold, with breathtaking images, unforgettable moments, and that idiosyncratic audio field.

One charge laid against the revered director Satyajit Ray was that, much like Kurosawa in Japan, his films weren't national or native enough, that they gave a Westerner's view of India, one moulded in Western forms, rather than something 'authentically' Indian. Another, related charge, is that he betrayed his subject matter - poverty, nature, repression, obsession etc. - by the fussy perfectionism of his style; David Thomson tells the story of Francois Truffaut, himself survivor of an impoverished, disruptive background, walking out of the aristocratic Ray's 'Pather Panchali', 'wearied by so much perfection'.

I don't know what 'authentically Indian' means; I certainly don't know whether authenticity, so grimly linked to nationalism, is a desirable aim. I suppose an authentically Indian film would not be an exquisite miniature, but a huge, sprawling, unstable, visceral film, full of rupture, sensation, violence, exoticism, noise, incongruity; but these views may be as inauthentically Western as any other. That said, 'The Cloud-Capped Star' seems to me to be a truer film than 'Pather', not necessarily as a representation of Indian experience, but of human experience, and certainly as a cinema experience, of which it is rare and overwhelming.

The irony is that the film is as replete with Western influences as Ray's. Director Ritwik Ghatak was a left-winger, and his film is a thrilling assault on mind and body, using many of the methods developed by Western leftists. The film is unashamedly a melodrama - the harrowing tale of a beautiful, clever, promising young woman who is mentally and physically broken by the relentless fending of a family alternately selfish and feckless.

Like the traditional melodrama , its primary appeal is emotional, as the heroine is battered by an inexorable series of crises, usually signalled by percussive frenzy in the music; characterisation is monochrome, the saintly goodness of the heroine contrasitng with the mean self-interest or cowardice of the rest.

But this is melodrama filtered through those of Douglas Sirk, who took this despised form and gave it a critical dimension. Not only does Ghatak use Sirkian devices - frames within frames, intrusive decor, 'unrealistic' lighting - but he takes the idea of the hysterical body to its limits - just as a character who must repress her emotions betrays them in physical pressures, so the repressions of character and narrative are displaced onto the form of the film, which is full of violent jump cuts, extreme clashes of composition, space and editing, deliberate dis-integration of musical numbers, a radical use of lighting and sound (including bizarre sci-fi whinings), taken to an extreme unavailable to Sirk in Hollywood, giving the film a formal hysteria that is reminiscent of another Sirk admirer, Godard. Did Ghatak see the contemporary 'A Bout De souffle' as he made this film? (I can imagine a tyro cineaste getting the same life-changing excitement from 'Star' as I did from the Frenchman when I was young).

The use of looming close-ups and rushes of blitzkrieg montage recall Eisenstein. The story of a family and a society is reminiscent in its breadth of a Victorian novel, while the schematic, almost scientific analysis of a victim placed in a very carefully observed social context reminds me of Zola. The spiritual power of the heroine's decline is even more staggering than Bresson (although, it's always women, isn't it?).

And yet, for all these formal influences, there is a faith in character missing (deliberately) in these masters, a psychological acuity mirroring the political anger. And if the film is beautiful, it is never complacently so: it is a beauty repeatedly violated, creating a new, modern beauty. Why has this film never made Top Ten lists?

For someone who is not quite in the know, the subject matter of the story is to us who grew up in that time and place quite mundane. I know exactly the kind of girl Ghatak is talking about here, even a decade ago there were many of them I could see while commuting in Kolkata. Things have changed, though, and it is nice to have such a compelling piece of art to retain those memories.

But of course Ghatak is working on two planes in this movie. Ostensibly about the hapless girl driven by circumstance, the poor, gentle, tough, dreamy girl who is laid bare by the vicissitudes of existence may as well be that other great love of the director's life, mother Bengal.

'Meghe dhaka tara' or the 'Cloud-clapped Star' is definitely one of the best films ever directed in Bengali,and it vividly portrays the directing skills of Ritwik Ghatak. The story revolves around a lower-middle class Bengali family, who lived in the refugee colonies situated in the outskirts of Kolkata. The father of the family was a English teacher and his eldest son 'Shankar'(Anil Chatterjee) was a promising young classical singer while the youngest son 'Montu' played football. Nita and Gita were two sisters, the former being somewhat responsible, caring, loving while the latter was simply a beauty conscious,lazy, insincere flirt. Owing to circumstances, Nita had to work as a private-tutor in order to feed her family as no one else had any urge, capacity or rather consciousness about their poverty. Another important character of the movie was Sanat, a talented Physics research fellow whom Nita sponsored for she had affections on him. According to the story Nita a working woman, couldn't spare time on him and Gita, her sister began having relations with him and eventually they married. Nita was heartbroken and neither Sankar nor their father supported their marriage. Sanat after his marriage didn't continue his research and found himself a job of high salary. Eventually Sankar established himself as a singer, Montu found a job in a factory, while Nita's health began deteriorating. It was found she was suffering from TB. She was sent to a sanatorium upon the mountains to recover and the film ends with Nita's death. One the last scenes perhaps the best of the film wonderfully shows Nita's love for life, her urge for struggle and her positive thinking. The film's one of the most impressing assets is the song, 'Je raate mor duar Guli' song beautifully by Debabrata Biswas. It was really suitable with the sad situation after Gita's marriage. The film over all portrays the life-struggle of a promising family with contemporary middle class livelihood. Actings of Anil Chatterjee and Supriya Devi is of high quality and the over all direction, screen-play, music equally good. The 'Lost Love' by William Wordsworth finds a perfect match in the movie.