The latest version of this page moved to indiancine.ma - Click here
Khandhar
aka The Ruins 1983 108’ col Hindi d/sc Mrinal Sen p Jagadish and Pushpa Chokhani pc Shri Bharatlaxmi Pics st Premendra Mitra’s Telenapota Abishkar (The Discovery Of The Village Telenapota) c K.K. Mahajan m Bhaskar Chandavarkar lp Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Geeta Sen, Pankaj Kapoor, Annu Kapoor, Sreela Majumdar, Rajen Tarafdar
Three friends from the city visit some ruins where an aged mother (Sen) and her daughter Jamini (Azmi) live. The mother awaits the arrival of a distant cousin to marry Jamini but the man is already married and living in Calcutta. The photographer Subhash (Shah) takes pity on the family and pretends to be the awaited suitor. The mother dies contented but when the threesome leave again, Jamini stays behind facing a life of loneliness in the ruins. The second Sen film to receive a Hindi release, its passive storyline and heavy emphasis on meaningful looks was a major departure from his political cinema of the 70s. Sen commented that ‘The film is partly memory and partly fantasy punctuated by bits of instant happenings’, and created an expressionist set of broken walls and ruins to replicate the woman’s state of mind. Claiming the influence of Robert Bresson, he also said that with this film he finally put the IPTA influence behind him, something he had aimed to do since the communist government returned to power in Bengal in 1977 which made the IPTA aesthetic into official policy.