Anuranan

Starring Rahul Bose, Raima Sen, Rituparna Sengupta, Rajat Kapoor
Directed by Annirudha Roy-Chowdhury
Rating; ** �

There's a strange and disarming dichotomy in the way director Annirudha Roy-Chowdhury pitches this mellow- drama about a marital quadrangle.

The inter-weavement of relationships among two married couple, Rahul Bose-Rituparna and Rajat-Raima (with so many 'r's in the credit titles no wonder Anurnanan means resonance!) doesn't render itself to easy definitions of love relationships and marriages.

But Anuranan does just that. It brings an endearingly de-toxified lucidity to feelings and thoughts that would otherwise require heavy amounts of polemics and passionate efforts to synthesize the sounds of breaking hearts with the background score.

A simple grace, sometimes bordering on an emotional naivete, runs through Anuranan, creating harmonies and resonances that seemed to vanish with the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee as these masters of the mellow-drama succumbed to the strenuous melodramas in the 1980s from the South by T Rama Rao and his screechy ilk who portrayed marriage in Maang Bharo Sajna and Ek Hi Bhool as occasions for opulent hysteria.

Anuranan reins it in. The cinematography (Sunil Patel) suggests a whispering subtlety in moments that are predominantly designed to create obtainable emotions.

There's an implosive energy to the harmonies that guide the four characters through a luscious visual and emotional landscape taking them from the bustle of London to the tranquility of Sikkim and then leaving them broken-hearted at the brink of disaster.

A certain casual maturity is applied to the way the debutant director looks at the man-woman axis in a marriage. Anuranan is a film where the hero often breaks into poetry in Bengali and English.

And let's say right out that Rahul Bose has never appeared more emotionally vibrant in any of his films. He plays a man who's almost a modern-day Ram, looking out for his wife with enviable sensitivity, feeding her rice and daal with his own (left) hand.

Simplistically, the other protagonist Rajat Kapoor is a bit of a cad for whom the sensex is far more important than sex with his tangibly desolate wife.

Look out for the moment where the wife Raima gets up from her lonely bed and pirouettes perkily on the terrace. It's one of those disarming moments of emotional nakedness that one comes across in the novels Gabriel Garcia -Marquez.

Marquez's is the world that Anuranan would like us to recall. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for its own lofty aspirations, it stations its emotions in a far more accessible domain, making the moments among the four characters engaging endearing warm realistic and yet cinematic.

The plot is laden with references to romantic notions that appear to be drifting away from contemporary marriages and today's cinema.

The editor (Mahadeb Shi) cuts the scenes a little too cleverly creating a rather bewildering contradiction between the straight-from-the-weep storytelling pattern and the way it swerves into unexpected time passages.

The cast is above the mundane,with Rahul Bose leading with his gently compassionate portrait of a soul whose heart aches for Nature. The two Bengali heroines are lovely, graceful and able to convey the designer-layerings of the narrative without getting card-board-ish or cramped in their allotted space.

And Raima in her spectacles and sari-clad look looks so much like her mythic grandmother Suchitra Sen !

The supporting cast seems to have walked out of a typical upper middleclass Bengali household. You could almost smell the fish frying in the kitchen.

Domesticity meets Rabindranath Tagore in this juke-box rendering of those marriage-on-the-rocks films that rocked Hindi cinema in the early 1970s.

But then, something changed. And it wasn't the marriage vows.