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Unishe April

1994 138’ col Bengali d/s Rituparno Ghosh pc Spandan Films p Renu Roy c Sunirmal Majumdar m Jyotishka Dasgupta lp Aparna Sen, Debashree Roy, Dipankar Dey, Prasenjit

Ghosh’s second feature, a major success, is an Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978) type melodrama focussing on the differences between a famous mother, the dancer Sarojini (Sen), and her daughter Aditi (Roy), a medical student in Delhi. The daughter, as was her doctor father before her, is unable to handle her mother’s sense of independence and fame. Most of the film takes place in a single night in Calcutta as the daughter tries to commit suicide on the anniversary of her father’s death. A barrage of dialogue - devoted to showing two major Bengali female stars, Sen and Roy, locked in a histrionic duel - ends only when the two become reconciled, not through any resolution of the major issues involved in their problems, but by reconfirming the filial bond. The film marked a departure from the dominant melodramas of the time which were geared to addressing, in the industry’s terms, ‘female and rural’ audiences rather than the urban middle class habituated to ‘modernising’ television drama.

Film