Komal Gandhar (E-Flat/A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale)

(1961, Ind, 134m, b/w)
d/p/sc Ritwak Ghatak ph Dilip Ranjan Mukhopadhyay (Mukherjee) ed Ramesh Joshi m Jyotirindra Moitra cast Supriya Choudhury, Abinash Bannerjee, Abhi Bhattacharya, Bijon Bhattacharya, Satindra Bhattacharya, Debabrata Biswas, Anil Chatterjee, Gita Dey

The first spoken line of Ghatak’s beautiful and deceptively gentle film articulates the plaintive incomprehension of post-partition Bengal: “why should I leave this beautiful country?” In the following scene we learn that “theatre is the mirror of society”, and just like the country, so the collaborating theatre troupes we follow are divided between and within themselves, and even the heroine, Anasuya, is in two minds. With beautiful deep shadows and gorgeously sun-drenched pastoral scenes for the gradual blossoming of young love, enriched by a lightness of touch in direction and tone (disrupted only once, in a shocking tracking shot that expresses perfectly the anguish of partition) Ghatak reconciles these divisions through a dense but deftly-woven tapestry of Bengali culture and contemporary allusion, a perpetually optimistic tale encompassing humiliating failure, heartache, jealously and uprootedness, that is also a fundamentally political statement that confines the actual political events of early 1960s’ Calcutta almost entirely to the soundtrack.

© Time Out Film Guide