Winkle Twinkle (Bengali)
Starring Ritwick Chakraborty, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rajatava Dutta, Sohini Sarkar
Directed by Srijit Mukherji
What happens when you are declared dead in 1976 and you wake up from the dead in 2002? When people around talk about Hrithik, you think it is Ritwick Ghatak they are referring to.
“Is he still making films?” wonders Sabyasachi Sen, back from the dead, and trying to come to terms with the radically transformed socio-political scenario.
Coincidentally, Sabyasachi is played by another Ritwick… Ritwick Chakraborty, one of the finest actors of the country, tragically not known much outside Bengal. As the time-challenged traveller from Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s CPM to Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, Ritwick has before him the daunting task to bridge two eras. He straddles the world he cannot leave behind, and the world that won’t accept him, with a sobering fluency. The performance is a textbook of naturalistic acting, yet not in any showy way.
In comparison, Parambrata Chatterjee as the son comes across weak, trying too hard to get into the skin of the loutish politically scrambled egghead determined to defy and drown Daddy’s idealism into rubbles of nihilism. He is especially ineffectual when scoffing at his screen father, as though his heart is not in it.
The supporting cast feels like an intrusion. The conversation with Stalin feels forcibly positioned in a film that feels like a father-son drama with a political slant sliding into the conflict.
The film is based on the critically acclaimed stage play by Bratya Basu. Srijit doesn’t take the play out of the film, which is a fine place to be, as long as the characters don’t appear excessively discursive.
In its audacious blend of time-travel and Bengal’s politics Winkle Twinkle reminded me of Mrinal Sen’s early political non-dramas Interview (1971) Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik (1973).
Srijit’s film about a dormant political traveller awakening to a new reality is an intriguing whodunnit where the slain entity is political idealism. Although the narrative tends to get heavy-handed at times, the quintessential political parable is anchored to a plaintive, persuasive predicament . What if a man who goes missing from his own memory to wake up to a world where politics is no longer about idealism, but opportunism?
Some of the tender moments in the anachronistic meditation are shared between the disoriented timeless protagonist and his wife (Anashua Majumdar).
“Why have you become so old?” the husband asks his wife.
Age-shaming gets shamed in this rippling discourse on the ultimate redundancy of time passages. And the wrinkles that follow.
