I have just returned from an evening show of the Bengali blockbuster Praktan , the latest offering from director duo Shiboprasad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy, and I am confused. The film, which seems to have captured the imagination of the Bengali middle-class audience, is laid out like a trusted eatery’s brunch buffet. It has something for everyone, no matter how generic that makes the meal. But that’s not my problem with it. As a seasoned Bengali film viewer, I am used to mediocrity by now. The Bengali film industry seems to have found the laziest form of self-defence — denial — and I have made my peace with that. It’s the feminist in me that found the film deeply disturbing.

Gimmicks have a way of ruining everything, and thus a severely flattened and insipid version of Gulzar’s 1987 classic Ijaazat is being presented to the Bengali middle-class as the comeback film of the popular Prosenjit-Rituparna Sengupta pair.

Every ill-considered editing choice here bears the sticky fingerprints of the directors cashing in on Bengali nostalgia, attempting to recreate the magic of the lead pair that gave Tollywood its biggest hits in the much-maligned 1990s, when the Bengali film industry was in doldrums. As a divorced couple who meet unexpectedly in a train journey, the lead pair is adequately restrained albeit a bit too self-aware. However, as their respective characters (actually, more the woman) revisit their marriage over the course of the two-day train journey between Mumbai and Kolkata, events take a confusing turn.

Dipa, played by Rituparna Sengupta, is a Mumbai-based conservation architect who, during a brief internship in Kolkata, falls in love with a charismatic walking tour guide Ujaan (Prosenjit). A walking tour guide, no matter how new-agey, makes much less money than an architect. Therefore, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what goes wrong with their marriage. Dipa struggles to adjust to Ujaan and his family’s ways, but she tries. Ujaan constantly tries to make her feel bad about herself, especially the fact that she earns more than he does. He badgers her for having planned a visit to her parents without his “permission”. Accuses her of sleeping with her boss and then brands her unreasonable for demanding a honeymoon. Oh yes, he also has this adorable habit of being all churlish and asking her to “accept him for what he is”. Now that’s a keeper!

So what’s so surprising about that, you may ask. We have celebrated brutes as heroes since Raj Kapoor force-kissed Nargis in Aag . But here’s the thing — the directors make Dipa get back at Ujaan by saying all the right things. She shames him for being a “chauvinistic pig”, calls out his hypocrisy consistently and takes a stand for the things that she believes in. The script makes Ujaan an insensitive lout and seems to side with the wife. Just when the feminist in you does a happy dance, you smell something rotten. The film pans out, and you realise that the directors seem to be playing a double game of sorts.

When confronted with Ujaan’s newfound domestic bliss — predictably, she meets his gregarious wife (Aparajita Auddy) and cute-as-a-button daughter before bumping into him in the train journey — Dipa has a change of heart. She feels she should have “compromised”. A character you have admired for being strong, assertive and independent, is suddenly reduced to a soppy stick figure. In perhaps the most regressive moment in recent Bengali cinema, Rituparna’s character (who is in a confessional mode with Ujaan’s wife), states that she has learned a great lesson from her, that one wins with compromise and that is the secret of happiness. A few scenes earlier, Auddy had confessed to Rituparna that she had successfully won over her husband and in-laws with “small compromises” and that her husband was a gem of a person.

There is nothing wrong in projecting the second wife as an embodiment of domestic bliss. She has given up her career of her own accord and dotes on her in-laws and husband. She is a well-fleshed out character anyway and that should have been enough for the film.

But the directors use her as a foil to Rituparna’s character. The good wife versus the bad wife. The one who stayed vs the one who left. It’s almost as if we, the audience, are supposed to forget what went wrong with the first marriage and focus on the need to compromise.

Obviously, all the compromising has to be done by the woman while the man is celebrated for his obstinacy. Seriously, what are the directors trying to tell us by making the independent, ambition-driven, woman regret not being able to work out a clearly abusive marriage?

The reason why a film like Praktan is detrimental to the discourse around female characters is very simple: it panders to the basest, most crudely primitive assumptions made about women. It takes a strong, positive female character and then outright assassinates her. And that, in my book, makes this film more dangerous than hundreds of Munnis and Sheilas.

Debapriya Nandi is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata

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