Meghe Dhaka Tara

When one decides to make a film on the First Citizen of Indian Cinema, it is bound to polarise the audience. If you expected that a certain doctor-cum-film enthusiast-turned-director will demystify and defictionalise the man and his legend, dismantling all the cliches and myths surrounding him, you were living in a fool's paradise. Initially, to garner media-hype, he proudly proclaimed 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' to be a biopic, only to disassociate himself from his previous claims, stating that it's a fictional work 'inspired' by Ghatak's life. Why the sudden and desperate face-saver? The positives first. Spectacular set designs, excellent use of light and shadow, Soumik Halder's stunning camera work, Debojyoti Mishra's brilliant score. Although the first half is barely watchable, the second half gets better with breathtaking visual imagery of Partition-affected immigrants, converging confluence of various characters from Ghatak's films, and of course, the superlative performances of Ananya and Subhasish. Kamaleswar chooses a very convenient and escapist medium to depict the master auteur's life: that of dreams and hallucinations. It works as a perfect alibi to (mis)represent Ghatak's thoughtscape as envisioned by him. Ghatak, audaciously self-indulgent and non-conformist to the core, quite paradoxically finds himself trapped in the flawed vision of a director who conforms to all the possible parameters of a sensationalist crowd-pleaser, almost like a footnoted historical and personal narrative. I do feel sorry for Shaswata. He is such a gifted actor and does justice to his role in parts, but one can't blame him for the director's myopic perception of Ghatak, and his life and times. All the ingredients are present, albeit in haphazard and erratic proportions in an already half-baked recipe, like - Jung's 'mother archetype', his swaying beliefs between revisionist and radical politics, the deep pangs of Partition, etc. But look at the banality of certain misplaced grandiose excesses (all in the name of passionately adhering to Ghatak's penchant for melodrama) - Shaswata, who almost lives on and swears by hooch or 'cholai', indiscriminately delivers hyperbolic punchlines with expletives, reminiscent of the 'angry young man' prototype during the Emergency rather than the Red Book-quoting generation of the 70s; he carries Bongobala in his arms with shrieking, angst-filled outcries of 'Suorer Bachha!' evoking Dilip Kumar's 'Ae bhai, koi hain?' act from 'Mashaal'; or even the salivating Shaswata during the enactment of his play at the mental asylum and the just-about-clinching-and-then-relaxing-of-fists-moment during the shock therapy session akin to a car's clutch-and-gear functioning, etc. Amplified exaggeration with playing-to-the-gallery-moments' galore, just enough to earn accolades and thundering applause from a generation, living in a joyless dungeon of failed ambitions and shattered dreams, finally being able to relate to the tragic story of a 'mad genius' who was a 'failure' in his lifetime. But Ghatak is much beyond the platitudes of the stereotypical portrait of an underdog. No, his life cannot be trivialised into a tragedy inhibited by dejection, pain, self-destruction and failure. On the contrary, it is a celebration of hope, of unwavering human spirit, of survival, of joy and optimism - boundless and unrestrained.