The opening song – 'Nodi Jodi mod hoito
' – of the film against a backdrop awash with the last vestiges of the day's waning sunlight strikes a chord and so does the very last scene – an agape and cursing Radhika (played by Rituparna) watching her live-in partner, Sombhu (played by Rajesh Sharma), burn while she makes out with a supine Kesta (played by Indraneil Sengupta). Though the last scene veers a tad from the original story, yet the camera freezing on the arresting moment achieves even more acclaim which it should. But, the story otherwise is an enterprise taken up by the director, Anjan Das, but not quite deftly accomplished. The application of the local sounds while Radhika peeks through an aperture made by her in the tent to watch Kesta and Jhumri have sex is rather plausible. Yet again, at other places, this music appears too stilted. The cinematography also, is fitfully bungling in some cases – at places it is excellent, as when the night scenes are shot, and at places it is bland as when the charming landscapes of Purulia during the day appear rather unromantic and unembellished. The art direction is not in question for its flawless arrangement.
The protagonist – Radhika, a snake charmer with a husband with reduced sexual prowess – finds her trade to be no more a feasible way of earning livelihood, yet sticks, rather dotingly, to it earning Sombhu's wrath in turn. On another plane she is a serial cuckoldress, trying to satisfy her sexual urges in whichever way possible – be it by leaving one of her husbands or by burning to death another. Her carnal hunger wreaks more havoc than her stomachic hunger. She vends ayurvedic medicines when snake charming hits a low, but she does not seek easy recourse to the illegal business of selling country liquor and chastises Sombhu who is inclined to take the short cut to easy money. He, on the other hand, stealthily sells the liquor brewed by her and in this very way, at last, hatches a plot to malign Kesta who is making passes at Radhika and is also eating away into Sombhu's business of snake charming. But, quite unexpectedly, his plan boomerangs as she is drawn closer to Kesta as a consequence. The performance by Kesta appears wooden. Jhumri is okay with her role. The sexual subtext, though touched upon, is justifiably dealt with restraint. That the traditional ways of earning a livelihood lose out to the modern and attractive ways impinge on our minds with a revelatory light on existentialism, alienation, desire and appetite for satisfaction. The most telling scene will always be, again, the last one with the camera freezing on the stunned face of Radhika who, with visible lines of sadomasochism, watches her husband die while engaged in a sexual act with another man. For the director the snake charmer's wife ('bedeni') is the springboard whence spring the subtexts into existence.
The movie, by and large, leaves an impression on the spectator that lingers with instances of epiphanic insights, and the last scene clubs our very inactive propensity and questions our self-satisfied morality.
