Sultry mood is not enough - Before the Rains

I had to hunt down where this film was playing - it was 70 miles away and I took a road trip to go catch it. The reviews have been so good, it is made by Sivan, has Nandita Das AND Rahul Bose so it seemed well worth the effort. Unfortunately I feel really let down by the film. It seems specifically made to cater to a Western audience and is less Indian than Darjeeling Limited! Sivan tells an engaging enough tale that the 90+ minutes do not hang heavy on your hands but the characters are not well etched at all. I went in expecting an Indian Ink (Stoppard) or a Passage to India (EM Forster), at the very least I was hoping for a Heat and Dust, but this is lower than that Ruth Praver Jhabvala fare.

Nandita Das plays Sajani, a woman who works as maidservant to the Moores family headed by Linus Roache as Henry Moores. While the wife (Jennifer Ehle) and son are away, Henry gets into an adulterous love affair with Sajani. With the help of TK, a local village man who is English educated, Henry is trying to build a road to improve the spice trade. Sajani is married to a brutish fellow, he does find out and all hell breaks loose. There is the obligatory tragic ending but you watch it from the outside with clinical detachment. The white man is a spineless fellow, the white woman a large hearted up-standing woman (like the white women in Lagaan, RDB).

Nandita Das has a meaningless role that she cannot sink her teeth into, Rahul Bose is equally wasted in the role of a man who is neither fish nor fowl, but caught between two cultures. So much could have been made of this character. Linus Roach plays the gutless white man exceedingly well, you hate him and yet you also know where he is coming from. Jennifer Ehle is wonderful in a small role as the woman full of empathy.

What Sivan does best is showcase the canvas, the photography is absolutely stunning. The locales are full of magic and every shimmering dew drop, the frog jumping into the pond, the mist rising from the tree tops, is all magically captured by his lens. Where he loses out is in etching the characters better, and having more to the story itself. This is a thin tale....
Read more HERE

Sultry mood is not enough - Before the Rains

I had to hunt down where this film was playing - it was 70 miles away and I took a road trip to go catch it. The reviews have been so good, it is made by Sivan, has Nandita Das AND Rahul Bose so it seemed well worth the effort. Unfortunately I feel really let down by the film. It seems specifically made to cater to a Western audience and is less Indian than Darjeeling Limited! Sivan tells an engaging enough tale that the 90+ minutes do not hang heavy on your hands but the characters are not well etched at all. I went in expecting an Indian Ink (Stoppard) or a Passage to India (EM Forster), at the very least I was hoping for a Heat and Dust, but this is lower than that Ruth Praver Jhabvala fare.

Nandita Das plays Sajani, a woman who works as maidservant to the Moores family headed by Linus Roache as Henry Moores. While the wife (Jennifer Ehle) and son are away, Henry gets into an adulterous love affair with Sajani. With the help of TK, a local village man who is English educated, Henry is trying to build a road to improve the spice trade. Sajani is married to a brutish fellow, he does find out and all hell breaks loose. There is the obligatory tragic ending but you watch it from the outside with clinical detachment. The white man is a spineless fellow, the white woman a large hearted up-standing woman (like the white women in Lagaan, RDB).

Nandita Das has a meaningless role that she cannot sink her teeth into, Rahul Bose is equally wasted in the role of a man who is neither fish nor fowl, but caught between two cultures. So much could have been made of this character. Linus Roach plays the gutless white man exceedingly well, you hate him and yet you also know where he is coming from. Jennifer Ehle is wonderful in a small role as the woman full of empathy.

What Sivan does best is showcase the canvas, the photography is absolutely stunning. The locales are full of magic and every shimmering dew drop, the frog jumping into the pond, the mist rising from the tree tops, is all magically captured by his lens. Where he loses out is in etching the characters better, and having more to the story itself. This is a thin tale....
Read more HERE

'I AM' First Look

'I AM' First Look

Khalid Mohammad reviews The Japanese Wife - 3.5 stars

The Japanese Wife
Cast: Rahul Bose, Chigasu Takaku, Raima Sen
Director: Aparna Sen
Rating: Three and a half stars
You return home with The Japanese Wife, the ninth feature film directed by Aparna Sen, the 64-year-old Kolkata-rooted actress. It stays with you. Although the tempo is excruciatingly slow and the screenplay repeats lines of dialogue as if they had been written by a squawking parrot, the result is limned with that near-extinct quality in cinema – humaneness.
Humanism was the leitmotif of Sen’s director and mentor –the great Satyajit Ray. Truly how you miss him. The actress he introduced in Teen Kanya (1961) has sought to carry the tradition forward, sticking to her home base and narrating stories that alternately rejoice and mourn with its characters. Of all her bids to take you through the heartscapes of her people, 36 Chowringhee Lane and Mr and Mrs Iyer remain her most accomplished, to-cherish-forever works.
Neither are her people grilled by grinning Mogambos. Nor are they paragons of virtue. They are buffeted by the societal circumstances and conditions around them, and by their own anxieties and desires. Take Paroma, in which adultery within a bhadra log house was tackled. In a way, Sen was retelling an updated Charulata, not with the same artistry, no way, but still it was a courageous effort,remarkable also for Raakhee’s career-best performance.
Vis-à-vis The Japanese Wife, it’s her most romantic work yet. Snag: it strikes you as largely implausible. A decade-and-a-half-long love story of a mild-mannered schoolteacher (Rahul Bose) in the Bengal interiors , and a chirpy girl (Chigasu Takaku) in a Japanese village, coerces you to suspend your sense of disbelief. Come on, this is much too far-fetched you go. They don’t set eyes on each other but behave as if they were to a Laila Majnu-manner born. Awww.
Okay, so what if the screenplay has been adapted from a story by the Oxford University-anchored Kunal Basu? The adaptation emphasises the innocence and the guilelessness of the odd couple, to the absolute exclusion of credibility. Placing the film’s dramaturgy within a realistic context – shooting on authentic locations, for instance – cannot prevent you from concluding that this is some kind of grim fairy tale. Which is why like it or not, The Japanese Wife isn’t as effective or as real (read: yes this could happen) as Sen’s Chowringhee or the ..Iyers.
Never mind. Because the outcome still clasps you in human bondage, the ironical finale moving you to tears. Without revealing the end, suffice it to say, the last 15 minutes or so vault way above the rest of the plotlet. Sen does it again, despite the obstacles and incredulous twists and turns on the way. She makes you care for her people. Genuinely.
The mousy teacher lives with his aunt (Moushumi Chatterjee, could have been more controlled). And the fey Japanese girl is bound to her home because of an ailing mother. Teacher and his oriental girl have been pen pals since years. Their letters to each other are read out, a device that is as unusual as it is endearing. So obsessive about each other, the two even believe that they are formally ‘married’. The Bengal hamlet is amused but can gets xenophobic during an Indo-Japanese kite flying competition. A somewhat protracted but disarmingly funny sequence this.
Something’s got to give. A young widow (Raima Sen) and her adolescent kid (Rudranil Ghosh) begin to crowd the teacher’s isolated life. Meanwhile, in Japan, the girl is hit by a terminal illness, forcing her to shift to Yokohama. Devastated, her ‘husband’ desperately seeks all forms of medical panaceas – unani, ayurvedic, allopathic.
A touching moment shows the girl in Japan drinking a mixture sent from India, and saying, “It has not shown any effects…but don’t worry…it will.” His hurried calls, with a mounting telephone meter, also make your heart go out to the teacher and to the only shred of love in his life. Earlier, he has been shown masturbating, and at another point, feels guilty about being attracted to the widow.Such moments are handled aesthetically and with maturity.
In fact, it is Aparna Sen’s intimate style that elevates the film beyond the archaic. But for references to email, a Bidi jalayele excerpt on television, you often feel lost in an earlier millennium. A Bengal village may be lost in time, certainly, but not to the extent of existing in a vacuum. On the upside, for social commentary Sen includes impactful asides like the widow refusing to eat fish served to her in a rustic restaurant, since denial is now her lot in life.

Read more HERE

Khalid Mohammad reviews The Japanese Wife - 3.5 stars

The Japanese Wife
Cast: Rahul Bose, Chigasu Takaku, Raima Sen
Director: Aparna Sen
Rating: Three and a half stars
You return home with The Japanese Wife, the ninth feature film directed by Aparna Sen, the 64-year-old Kolkata-rooted actress. It stays with you. Although the tempo is excruciatingly slow and the screenplay repeats lines of dialogue as if they had been written by a squawking parrot, the result is limned with that near-extinct quality in cinema – humaneness.
Humanism was the leitmotif of Sen’s director and mentor –the great Satyajit Ray. Truly how you miss him. The actress he introduced in Teen Kanya (1961) has sought to carry the tradition forward, sticking to her home base and narrating stories that alternately rejoice and mourn with its characters. Of all her bids to take you through the heartscapes of her people, 36 Chowringhee Lane and Mr and Mrs Iyer remain her most accomplished, to-cherish-forever works.
Neither are her people grilled by grinning Mogambos. Nor are they paragons of virtue. They are buffeted by the societal circumstances and conditions around them, and by their own anxieties and desires. Take Paroma, in which adultery within a bhadra log house was tackled. In a way, Sen was retelling an updated Charulata, not with the same artistry, no way, but still it was a courageous effort,remarkable also for Raakhee’s career-best performance.
Vis-à-vis The Japanese Wife, it’s her most romantic work yet. Snag: it strikes you as largely implausible. A decade-and-a-half-long love story of a mild-mannered schoolteacher (Rahul Bose) in the Bengal interiors , and a chirpy girl (Chigasu Takaku) in a Japanese village, coerces you to suspend your sense of disbelief. Come on, this is much too far-fetched you go. They don’t set eyes on each other but behave as if they were to a Laila Majnu-manner born. Awww.
Okay, so what if the screenplay has been adapted from a story by the Oxford University-anchored Kunal Basu? The adaptation emphasises the innocence and the guilelessness of the odd couple, to the absolute exclusion of credibility. Placing the film’s dramaturgy within a realistic context – shooting on authentic locations, for instance – cannot prevent you from concluding that this is some kind of grim fairy tale. Which is why like it or not, The Japanese Wife isn’t as effective or as real (read: yes this could happen) as Sen’s Chowringhee or the ..Iyers.
Never mind. Because the outcome still clasps you in human bondage, the ironical finale moving you to tears. Without revealing the end, suffice it to say, the last 15 minutes or so vault way above the rest of the plotlet. Sen does it again, despite the obstacles and incredulous twists and turns on the way. She makes you care for her people. Genuinely.
The mousy teacher lives with his aunt (Moushumi Chatterjee, could have been more controlled). And the fey Japanese girl is bound to her home because of an ailing mother. Teacher and his oriental girl have been pen pals since years. Their letters to each other are read out, a device that is as unusual as it is endearing. So obsessive about each other, the two even believe that they are formally ‘married’. The Bengal hamlet is amused but can gets xenophobic during an Indo-Japanese kite flying competition. A somewhat protracted but disarmingly funny sequence this.
Something’s got to give. A young widow (Raima Sen) and her adolescent kid (Rudranil Ghosh) begin to crowd the teacher’s isolated life. Meanwhile, in Japan, the girl is hit by a terminal illness, forcing her to shift to Yokohama. Devastated, her ‘husband’ desperately seeks all forms of medical panaceas – unani, ayurvedic, allopathic.
A touching moment shows the girl in Japan drinking a mixture sent from India, and saying, “It has not shown any effects…but don’t worry…it will.” His hurried calls, with a mounting telephone meter, also make your heart go out to the teacher and to the only shred of love in his life. Earlier, he has been shown masturbating, and at another point, feels guilty about being attracted to the widow.Such moments are handled aesthetically and with maturity.
In fact, it is Aparna Sen’s intimate style that elevates the film beyond the archaic. But for references to email, a Bidi jalayele excerpt on television, you often feel lost in an earlier millennium. A Bengal village may be lost in time, certainly, but not to the extent of existing in a vacuum. On the upside, for social commentary Sen includes impactful asides like the widow refusing to eat fish served to her in a rustic restaurant, since denial is now her lot in life.

Read more HERE

'The Japanese Wife' idea came over coffee: Aparna Sen

Actor-director Aparna Sen says the idea for her upcoming film "The Japanese Wife" came about over a cup of coffee with author Kunal Basu.

"It's a very, very unusual love story," Aparna Sen told reporters at a press conference here Tuesday.

She added that the movie, which stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen, Moushumi Chatterjee and Japanese actress Chingusa Takaku, is set to release April 9.

"The Japanese Wife" tells the tale of Snehamoy (Rahul Bose), a schoolteacher in the interiors of Sundarbans, West Bengal, and Migaya (Chingusa Takaku). They start off as pen pals, fall in love and even get married through letters. And while they have been married for 15 years, they have never met each other.

Aparna Sen's source of inspiration for the unique story is writer Kunal Basu's short story.

"I was actually collaborating with Basu on some other script and was unable to get anything film-worthy. At a normal coffee break, when Kunal told me of this story, every other plot went out of my head," said Aparna Sen.

LINK

'The Japanese Wife' idea came over coffee: Aparna Sen

Actor-director Aparna Sen says the idea for her upcoming film "The Japanese Wife" came about over a cup of coffee with author Kunal Basu.

"It's a very, very unusual love story," Aparna Sen told reporters at a press conference here Tuesday.

She added that the movie, which stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen, Moushumi Chatterjee and Japanese actress Chingusa Takaku, is set to release April 9.

"The Japanese Wife" tells the tale of Snehamoy (Rahul Bose), a schoolteacher in the interiors of Sundarbans, West Bengal, and Migaya (Chingusa Takaku). They start off as pen pals, fall in love and even get married through letters. And while they have been married for 15 years, they have never met each other.

Aparna Sen's source of inspiration for the unique story is writer Kunal Basu's short story.

"I was actually collaborating with Basu on some other script and was unable to get anything film-worthy. At a normal coffee break, when Kunal told me of this story, every other plot went out of my head," said Aparna Sen.

LINK