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1985 134’[B]/138’[H] col Bengali/Hindi? d/s Aparna Sen pc Usha Ents lyr Gulzar c Ashok Mehta m Bhaskar Chandavarkar lp Raakhee, Sandhya Rani Chatterjee, Aparna Sen, Mukul Sharma, Dipankar De, Anil Chatterjee, Bharati Devi, Chitti Ghosal, Manas Mukherjee Jr, Arjun Guha-Thakurta
Sen followed up her directorial debut, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) with this story about a 40-year-old married woman, Parama (Raakhee) who falls in love with Rahul (Sharma), an expatriate photo-journalist working for glossy magazines who photographs her making her look glamorous. Their affair, and the invasion of the glamour machine into her life, becomes a problem when some of the photographs, earlier admired by the family, are published in a journal. Parama is rejected by her husband and has a mental breakdown. In the end, a doctor suggests prescribing psychiatric treatment and when Parama adamantly refuses any sense of guilt, her young daughter comes and gives her mother moral support. The film is notable mainly for its emancipatory thrust, undermined by a class-inflected sense of nostalgia for ‘belonging’, rather than for its cinematic qualities which are akin to the kitschy style of glossy consumer magazines. The Bengali version, shown in Calcutta amid much controversy, was successful; the Hindi version received a fitful release.