Actor-turned-director Parambrata Chatterjee’s thirteenth directorial venture is not an easy watch. It is verbose (so either you are fluent in Bengali or a fast reader), deeply tragic, and unabashedly resilient in its quest for the essence of life within the marital domain.
When we first meet Amar Gupta (Anjan Dutta), he is seen taking his ailing wife Joyita (Aparna Sen) home after a session of chemotherapy with his sullen son Joy (Parambrata Chatterjee) and Joy’s wife. To say the tension in the car is palpable would be an understatement.
Parambrata Chatterjee builds on the mounting tension to a nerve-wracking degree. There are no pockets of relief in the storytelling, no smile breaks, and no humorous interludes. Throbbing with tension and forebodings of impending mortality, Ei Raat Tomar Amar is a relentlessly grim tale of a marriage being rocked by piercing questioning on its fiftieth anniversary.
Amar and Joyita seem to have shared a blissful marital togetherness for fifty years. They have reached a stage in their lives when the status quo cannot be tampered with, not without calamitous results. And yet, during that night of searching (the film’s title comes from Hemant Mukherjee’s classic song in the film Dweep Jwele Jai), uncomfortable probing questions are raised.
I found the search for symmetry in the screenplay a tad too neat: if Amar has a woman in his past, Joyita, too, reveals she had a man other than her husband in her past. Tit for tat? I almost expected the spirited Joyita (she insists on drinking even with her delicate health, on her anniversary, with, of course, a ticker-tape message at the bottom warning us that alcohol is injurious to your health, even if you are already dying) to burst out laughing and declare she was only kidding about the extra-marital affair.
Aparna Sen’s portrayal of the terminally ill Joyita is the more difficult of the two. Although she is dying, she is more alive and vibrant than her sombre husband, Amar. Ms Sen is heartwarming and charming, although some of the sequences where she tries to lighten the mood are somewhat clumsily played out. And what’s with the hair after intense chemotherapy, when earlier, she is shown with a scarf on her head, suggesting baldness?
Anjan Dutt, trying to balance his role as caregiver with his bad back, is pitch-perfect. In his search for his character’s deeply embedded joylessness, Dutta doesn’t falter even for a second.
A rat plays a pivotal role in the couple’s candid conversations. It appears to be a contrivance designed for diversion in a drama that didn’t need any.
The confined space is used to give the couple’s final night together a feeling of foreboding. The background score is elegiac and unforgiving: don’t expect the mood to swerve away from the melancholic mode. Chironjib Bordolo’s writing is skilled and sinewy, but the search for adventure takes the couple’s last night together unnecessarily into uncharted areas. Prosenjit Chowdhury’s cinematography is sumptuous and sensuous in challenging contrast to the grim mood.
