Goon’s poem to turned into Nekabborer Mohaproyan: A film

Bangla Movie

The nicest thing anyone can tell us is not “I love you,” the nicest thing anyone can tell us is “Have you eaten?” Whoever asks this question the most, loves us the most. After all, everything we do is ultimately to put food on the table, for us and our loved ones. All of us - man, beast, bird, insect and even bacteria - need food to survive. Man and nature are inextricably interwoven by the struggle for food.

The main theme of “Nekabborer Mohaproyan,” a film based on Nirmalendu Goon’s poem, is the struggle for survival in rural Bengal. Peasants are working hard to make ends meet but are subdued by the evil Munshi who cheats them out of fair prices. One of the peasants, the Christ-like Nekabbor- straight out of Pasolini’s “Gospel According to St Matthew” and trained in SM Sultan’s “Gymnasium” - rises up to the challenge of facing evil Munshi. The second theme is love: Nekabbor’s passionate love for Fatema; and his unconditional love, the greatest kind of love, for nature. Fatema’s father happens to be evil Munshi’s close associate and soon it turns out Munshi himself wants to marry her. This dual food/love clash with evil Munshi lead Nekabbor to leave his beloved village which for him is akin to leaving one’s planet. Just as we are bound to mother-earth by the umbilical cord of gravity, so is he bound to the earth of his village. In the background of all this is the war theme which becomes the heart breaking prologue and epilogue. It begins and ends with the real poet Nirmalendu Goon in a blood-red punjabi walking on deep green grass, weeping for an unknown man who just died.

The film has a certain rawness, it has Ritwik Ghatak’s not-clinically-disinfected-poverty feel, that makes it look realistic; but the night scenes have such low-contrast photography it is difficult to make out what is going on. The approach is quite original; but the story is a cliché spun a million times. The songs are quite good, I particularly liked “Istetion” and “Tomar Sobuj Jole,” but it felt incongruous with the hard-hitting filmmaking. Non-actors gave fine performances, for example, the poet Asim Saha’s speech to the farmers brought a rare authenticity; but veteran actor Mamunur Rashid’s evil Munshi is nonchalant at best. The jewel in the crown, however, is Nekabbor himself. Jewel Jahur in “Nekabborer Mohaproyan” is as good as Prosenjit Chatterjee in “Moner Manush.” It is his terrific performance that made it worth the trip to the cinema- an actor to watch out for.

Ultimately the film is a mess. It feels that the director does not really care for the narrative, he is more interested in forming images, framing painterly shots, stitching up a montage of visual metaphors. The story is just an excuse, a framework for some abstract ideas. Thus we have shots of - a huge tree of life, a top spinning, frog in a bowl, birds in a cage, a mouse trapped - that sort of things. Unfortunately, these could not be tied up with the film itself and the whole thing becomes an editor’s worst nightmare, completely alienating the audience as a result. It feels someone did not do the homework.

“Nekabborer Mohaproyan” got a barebones release in Balaka 2 and it was projected from a computer. The marketing was minimum, so I am guessing they depended on word of mouth publicity. It is important to realise that films might get only two weeks to get back their cost, so how it is released is extremely important. Cinema is the commercialisation of an idea usually tied up in a story and the producers want enough people to buy tickets so the film industry would continue to exist. Cinema is not the Pharaoh’s tomb that ensures immortality.

Source: Dhaka Tribune