This is a man who identifies as a Communist, a man who decides he will make films on his own terms… And Chanchal Chowdhury plays him brilliantly. Mrinal Sen is a hero, but the film has no hero-worship.
In an early scene in Srijit Mukherji’s new film, the actor Korak Samanta (who plays the younger Mrinal Sen) gets into a tram and begins to talk to the camera, thus breaking the fourth wall. He breaks it a little more when he points to the man standing at the doorway of the same tram, who happens to be the director who hired this actor: Srijit Mukherji. This is a technique Mrinal Sen used in his 1971 film Interview, where the protagonist breaks the fourth wall and we even see the camera crew that’s filming him. Interview is the third film in The Calcutta Trilogy, the other two being Calcutta 71 and Padatik, which means foot soldier. That is what Mrinal Sen was: a foot soldier of cinema, who fought guerilla-style from the trenches. Though his films broke many conventions of form, he says: “What you say is more important than the medium.” He admits that his films are a crude pamphlet, not a leatherbound journal.
This mostly chronological film moves between black-and-white and colour, and Indranath Marik’s exquisite cinematography does not try to mimic the bleached, grainy rawness of Mrinal Sen’s work. We are not watching “a Mrinal Sen film”. We are watching a Srijit Mukherji film about Mrinal Sen, so visually, at least, Padatik is suffused with Srijit’s aesthetic sensibility. But as we keep moving / jump-cutting between Mrinal Sen’s life events and their reflections in his films, we get a sense of the older director as well. In this film, Mrinal’s father touches his shoulder, and we cut to Dhritiman Chatterjee and the actor playing his father enacting a similar gesture in a Mrinal Sen movie. His life informed his films. The movie-Mrinal sees the outstretched hands of famine-affected children, and we cut to Smita Patil holding up a photograph of the famine in Akaler Sandhaney.
I loved this peculiar scene where a boy asks Mrinal for money. After a bit of thought, the not-yet filmmaker hands over some rupees. Srijit crafts a sentimental moment for this most unsentimental of filmmakers: as the boy runs off, the music swells, and we get an overhead shot of Mrinal. This is staged as a big moment, as it undoubtedly was for Mrinal Sen – and the irony is that the man himself barely had any money. In a fantastically furious scene, he strips naked in front of a mirror and rants at himself (his reflection) for wanting to make movies. At one point, he even tells his wife Geeta that maybe they should end it all with some sleeping pills. (The lovely Monami Ghosh plays Geeta as both a long-suffering and sharp-talking woman.) The same angst is seen when Mrinal sees foreign films at the International Film Festival of India. He wonders when we will make such movies.
This is a man who reads Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a man who identified as a Communist, a man who went to the studio instead of going to the hospital to be with his wife in the last stage of pregnancy, a man who decided he would make films on his own terms (he refuses to remove a shot to make a film palatable for foreign audiences), a man who preferred lower budgets because there is less pressure, a man who wanted to change cinema… And Chanchal Chowdhury, who takes over from Korak Samanta, plays him brilliantly. The makeup is superb, and even those of us who haven’t seen as much of the real Mrinal Sen can sense the work that has gone into reproducing both the exterior of the man and the essence of the man.
Srijit Mukherji clearly worships Mrinal Sen, but in Padatik, there is no hero worship. Samrat Chakraborty plays his son Kunal, who lives in the US. He offers a critique of Mrinal’s latest movie: “I don’t agree with the worldview of film. It doesn’t affect me personally… It is intellectually forced.” The world, apparently, has moved on: from Communist father to Capitalist son. Kunal, then, gives his father a box of baklava, bought during a layover. And Mrinal remembers the piece of sandesh that fell on the floor when they were poor and Kunal was a boy. But Kunal also admits, “If you didn’t put cinema above all, cinema wouldn’t put you above all.” He understands that the path to greatness is utter selfishness. In this context, it’s touching to see the scene from the past where an earthquake occurs and Mrinal’s first instinct is to protect the infant Kunal. He cared. It’s just that he cared about cinema more. That is why, as the Satyajit Ray character says, geniuses end up feeling lonely.
There is a lot of name-dropping in Padatik, which moves like a dream. (Srijit is the editor, too.) We get a scene with Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter “Indu”. We get to see the “genesis” of Bhuvan Shome, which, along with Sara Akash and Uski Roti released the same year, inaugurated the Hindi New Wave (or what came to be known as Parallel Cinema). We get the scene that gave birth to Baishey Sravana. (It involves Rabindranath Tagore.) We get a scene with Ritwik Ghatak, drunk and starving. We even get a scene with an unnamed cab driver, who tells Mrinal Sen that he has seen Bhuvan Shome and loved it. Whether real or imagined, the cab driver stands in for all audinces who proved that this “new cinema” had a reach far beyond the intellectual elite. After all, Mrinal Sen hated nostalgia. He made movies about the present day, and about people’s rage and frustrations in the present day.
And that’s why the most important name-drop in Padatik is Satyajit Ray, brilliant portrayed by Jeetu Kamal. (Like many characters in the film, his name is tweaked.) The scenes where Ray and Sen talk gave me gooseflesh, like the meeting of the characters played by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. The two great filmmakers respected each other and yet criticised each other, and one of the slyest passages in Padatik is the intercutting between the idyllic “memory game” scene in Aranyer Din Ratri and the poltically charged demonstrations in Calcutta ’71. In Ray’s movie, Mao Tse-tung is just a name-drop by the bourgeoisie. Sen’s film shows Mao’s principles among the proletariat. Srijit doesn’t do a Ray-versus-Sen “who was better” comparison, but in a way, his film in itself is a kind of “memory game”, a series of recollections about one of our foremost filmakers. If you know Mrinal Sen, Padatik is a beautiful album of memories. If you don’t know him, this is a great place to start.
