Classic Tuesdays film this month is Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali. It will be screened next Tuesday at 6 pm at the National Gallery, Castellani House, Vlissengen Road, Georgetown.
An adaptation of a novel by India’s great poet, author and Noble Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, the complex emotional drama Chokher Bali (2003) subtitled A Passion Play, is written and directed by Rituparno Ghosh and set in Bengal between 1902 and 1905. The film tells the story of Binodini, a beautiful and educated young woman (Aishwarya Rai), who is saved from a widow’s life of seclusion by an invitation from a wealthy relative, Rajlakshmi (Lily Chakrabarti), to live with her in her home, shared by her son, Mahendra (Prasenjit Chatterjee), a recently married doctor, and visited by her adopted son, Behari (Tota Raychoudhuri), also a doctor, both of whom at an earlier time had refused Binodini’s hand in marriage.
Initially besotted with his young wife Ashalata (Raima Sen), the self-indulgent Mahendra develops a strong attraction for Binodini while Behari, the quiet intellectual, appears admiring but mesmerized into inactivity. With many comedic moments from the controlling but blunt-speaking mother-in-law, irony and tension are added by Binodini’s and Ashalata’s devotion to each other, which leads them to follow a Bengali practice of adopting a shared nickname, in their case ‘Chokher Bali’, translated as ‘Sand in the Eye’, denoting someone close and hard to get rid of.
Betrayal leads to inevitable discovery and a dramatic resolution of this situation through its central characters’ pain, anger, and accusation as well as nobility of spirit, bittersweet loss and self-denial.
This film was presented at over 25 international film festivals, including India’s 34th International Film Festival, and those in Toronto, London, Chicago, Washington DC, and Locarno, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard (Best Film) award. It also won India’s National Film Award for Best Bengali Feature Film, as well as awards for Best Art Direction and Costume Design.
The film’s running time is 2 hours 25 minutes and is shown through the courtesy of the Indian Cultural Centre, High Commission of India, Georgetown. Admission is free.
