Notizie

Not a fan of the horror genre, I was taken aback by how shaken I was with the business on hand in Bhog (in Bengali on Hoichoi) largely for its central performance. Actor Anirban Bhattacharya’s jolting performance as a working-class bloke who transforms into a possessed entity, right in front of our disbelieving eyes, echoes Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

There is an unsettling normalcy to Atin’s behaviour, his environment and his near ones at the start. Admittedly, Atin lost his mother when he was young. But he was more than compensated for by a mother-figure Pushpa (Sudipa Basu), whom Atil treats with a mixture of reverence and mischief.

How is he, or we, to know that Pushpa would disappear into thin air, literally with no forwarding address?

There is a chilling finality to the eerie happenings in this sturdily ominous fear feast, based on a short story by Avik Sarkar.

LGBT topics are on the rise recently on Asian cinema, with a number of directors dealing with the subject across countries and issues faced. At the same time, though, most of the time, the focus is on the young, who also present a particular visual appeal, with very few exceptions, as in the works of Ray Yeung for example. Chandradeep Das opts to focus on two elderly women, in order to highlight how love can bloom under any circumstances, without omitting, though, to highlight the difficulties such relationships pose in a setting such as India’s.

Jasmine That Blooms in Autumn review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative

The two protagonists are Meera and Indira, both of which are residing in a retirement home, and find themselves falling in love. While Indira urges Meera to wear the garland she has made for her in public, she is still afraid of the public outcry.