Shesh Pata
Starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, Gargee Roychowdhury, Vikram Chatterjee, Rayati Bhattacharya
Written and Directed by Atanu Ghosh
Rating: ****
In life we pay many kinds of debt, most of them with pain some with no regret. Writer-director Atanu Ghosh delves deep into the human conscience in search of answers to the imponderable question of human existence: why do we live? What is the purpose of life?
The finely-threaded narrative, shot in that part of Kolkata which you never saw in Roland Joffe’s City Of Joy, weaves in and out of the listless life of a fading writer Balmiki(Prosenjit, in yet another magnificent career-defining performance). Balmiki is done with life…or is life done with him?
The balance between human desire and elemental truth is never easy to achieve.Shesh Pata tries , and succeeds in bringing out the various strands of irony tragedy and karmic inevitability in the human condition. The theme of debt and obligation runs across the film like trickles of water on an ancient branch of a tree that has long forgotten to provide shade.
Balmiki must complete his memoir before his time runs out. Not that anyone is interested in his life. They just want to know the truth about Balmiki’s glamorous wife Roshni’s brutal murder.
In a scenario of unmitigated salaciousness, Shesh Pata creates a sense of harmony between mortality and remembrance. There are several plot-points where we are compelled to revisit the writer-director’s storytelling just to ensure that we have not missed anything.
Missed opportunities flow in abundance in Shesh Pata. Sounak(Vikram Chatterjee) the debt collector assigned to get that memoir out of the cantankerous old writer,has debts of his own to pay. His long-standing relationship with Deepa(Rayati Bhattacharya, a natural) who, needless to say,has her own debts to pay, is conveyed in the narrative with remarkable fluency.
The couple rents hotel rooms for half an hour, grabs South Indian food at an Udipi restaurant where a South Indian film song plays as they do their mutual loving gaze.It is a defiantly defining moment of furtive togetherness between the couple.
Not much background music has gone into the storytelling.The music that plays in the narrative is largely soundless. Balmiki’s relationship with Medha(Gargee Roy Choudhary) a troubled newly divorced middleaged woman who agrees to do a longhand recording of Balmiki’s memories, gradually becomes central to the plot. The relationship that grows between the two anchorless drifters could have been more detailed. But what we get is just beautiful.
Medha sings songs for Balmiki on request, changes his clothes when he is drenched.Are the two in love? And what about the little errand buy who brings seasonal flowers for Balmiki every day? He is also a part of a spiritual nexus between creativity and mortality that Atanu Ghosh constructs with such delightful diligence.
My favourite sequence in the film shows Balmiki going up a randomly chosen highrise to end his life but changing his mind when he meets a little girl in the lift.
Funny, how chance encounters change your perspective on life.Shesh Pata does just that.
