‘Ei Raat Tomar Amaar’ is a story of evaluating relationships and delving into the deepest recesses of one’s mind to question where a relation truly stands even after fifty years of togetherness.

 

Right from the first scene, we see a couple in their seventies, with an ailing wife suffering from terminal cancer (with metastasis). Amar Gupta enacted by Anjan Dutt, does everything in his power to nurse his debilitated wife who is married to him for 50 years. The dialogs are crisp, witty and sometimes incisive. The couple’s dialogs meander through revelations and reconciliations throughout the span of a night, which is also ostensibly their 50th anniversary night. Aparna Sen wants to make the best of whatever little time she has, and sometimes this ardor to live life in the moment drives her actions, like a nice celebratory dinner with whiskey, something that is forbidden for a terminal cancer patient. She gets to listen to her favorite old songs, cleans up her worship place, gets a candle lit by her husband, almost in a hurry to experience it all, because time is ticking, more so for her. She also makes a sincere attempt to incisively scan through Anjan’s psyche and holds a mirror of his own flaws in front of Anjan, as it relates to his complications with their only son. The archetypal desire of many Bengali (or Indian) fathers to have their failed dreams imposed on their wards for realization, is well portrayed here through the dialogs of Aparna and Anjan. Aparna tries desperately to make Anjan bury the hatchet with his son once and for all. Anjan’s fragility also comes to fore when he asks his wife, if she too sees him as a  „loser“ (still hurt from the heated exchanges with his son).

 

Having seen a terminal patient (my mother) go through three attacks of cancer, with the whole nine yards of metastasis, incontinence, and then finally the bug reaching my mom’s brain to make her ability to comprehend, eat, speak, walk, go away slowly, I knew right from the get go, that Aparna Sen had to go eventually. Hence, viewing her dialogs and movements, with her ephemeral existence in mind, was particularly appealing to me. Everything had to be done ‘right now’.

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The way she handles Anjan’s short lived affair in past with a certain lady, is balanced, without any animosity. This was a quest, maybe a last quest, to seek his rationale for such an act. But she kept caviling that ‘they’ (Anjan and his illicit lover) would have made a good couple. The moment when she also shares her deepest secret with her husband was also fraught with a lot of pain for both. The existential questions in a long-married life, where love and habits often get interspersed or blurred and maybe a bit blunted with the dreariness of time, was handled adroitly. Self-evaluations, questioning the dimension of the other’s relations, and quickly (almost instantaneously) shifting back to caring and nurturing was brilliant. Anjan gets hurt knowing Aparna’s secret relation, but quickly pivots back to a caring husband and a friend trying to do his best in spite of many odds. Maybe the habit of many decades kicks in or is forcefully invoked as a defense mechanism by him.

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I loved the inclusion of a mouse, which was almost allegorical in this film, that fills in some voids and loneliness in this gory situation of a terminal patient. I say ‘allegorical’ because it kind of portrays a semblance of their relationship too, where in the end, the mouse also chooses to stay back in the same house, defying freedom. It gives some distraction from the melancholy.  In fact, the first smile on Anjan’s face was from his childlike glee on capturing the little mouse. Aparna showers her motherly affection on the mouse on this fateful night by feeding this mouse, after comparing it to an imprisoned person who also deserves food.

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Aparna has been a prolific actress and a director with international acclaim. The fact that her acting would be seasoned was no surprise to me. But Anjan Dutt truly surprised me. His frustration, the depression of a caregiver who knows for sure that his partner is terminal, is excellently portrayed by him. His expressions, his gait with a strained back and his dialogs were so real, that it seemed that there was no camera at all. In fact, he surpassed himself as an actor. The director needs to mature a bit more. Aparna needs help to get her body and feet to be rested on a bed, yet she can pull a chair and stand on it to reach a high shelf??!! That’s a bit rookie stuff! Also, I felt that there are better ways to show Anjan’s constipation or bowel issues. (Maybe take some tips from Hindi film ‘Piku’?).

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Aparna’s voice had the tiredness that is characteristic of someone having gone through chemo and is suffering from metastasis. (My mother had lost her vocal cords totally during her third attack of cancer, as a result of chemo). ‘Tumi Robe Nirobe’ was a very appropriate song, poignantly used in the film. The home looked like a true home and not like a film set, with some unkempt corners in it, just like one can expect in a home inhabited by septuagenarians. Overall, this film is worth watching and although it has some predictabilities in some scenes, the acting, sets, and dialogs did justice to the narrative.