My adventures with Bhuban Majhi
I first heard about Bhuban Majhi from Shafiq bhai, the colourful, ornery owner of Tajmahal Restaurant near Atlanta. I have a soft spot for the man. Shafiq bhai's culinary repertoire runs the gamut from impeccable kachchi biriyani to all manners of delicious bhartas, including a mean shutkir bharta. You have to love somebody who is so passionate about shutki that he makes his own by drying fish on his roof in the scorching Atlanta sun.
I digress. Shafiq bhai was annoyed at my ignorance about the film. "You should listen to the lovely music by Kalikaprasad. The poor man just died."
After half an hour of Googling, I was intrigued. News of the film brought back vivid memories of living through those terrible days in 1971. I wanted to screen it in Atlanta. Seba Bangla Library, the voluntary organisation I'm associated with, backed me. We took added financial risk, but we decided to do it right. We would screen a Bangladeshi film in a state-of-the-art multiplex to offer viewers a proper movie-going experience.
As soon as we got to work, it became painfully clear why Bangladeshi films are virtually never screened here. The logistics are just too daunting.
It costs an arm and a leg to rent the theatre and pay the film distributor. Then there's the biggest challenge of getting people interested enough to come and watch the film.
I thought the idea of watching a thoughtful film on our liberation war was a no-brainer. Silly me. Little did I know the expat Bangladeshi community.
Many Bangladeshis, I soon discovered, weren't keen, but they were loath to say it outright. They preferred to hem and haw. I quickly learned to detect the tell-tale signs, the thousand-and-one excuses.
"It's on Sunday evening? That won't work," a Bangladeshi matron wailed plaintively. "My husband has to go to work early Monday. Our kids go to school. And it's such a long commute. The time's not so good, either. It's too early to have dinner before the show, and it will get really late by the time we are home." She went on and on.
I bit my tongue and refrained from responding: "But bhabi, surely you're joking! Had this been a show with Shah Rukh Khan prancing about the stage with a bunch of nymphets, you would go even if the show time was on midnight Wednesday. You would be squealing with excitement, with your septuagenarian mom and teenage daughter in tow."
I feigned a polite smile. To be fair, people have a right to choose their entertainment.
On the day of the show, I was pleasantly surprised. Well over a hundred people showed up. Friends, acquaintances pitched in with extra support. Some local businesses supported us. After the show, most people were happy with the film.
Bhuban Majhi is based on a true story of an ordinary person's evolution, of turning from a pacifist into a freedom fighter, during our 1971 Liberation War. What makes it even more compelling is the fact that the film follows the main protagonist to the present, and raises disquieting questions about the ideological fault-lines that remain.
That film brought back vivid memories of 1971. As Charles Dickens had said in A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Amidst the Pakistani killing, raping and pillage, a new nation emerged that refused to bow down. The stirring tales of our unarmed youth turning into formidable muktijoddhas, the touching, heartwarming support of our Bengali neighbours in West Bengal who unconditionally opened their hearts and homes to give us refuge, the worldwide public support for our cause and condemnation of Pakistani barbarity – these developments inspired us.
Then on December 16, 1971, the hated Pakistani Army surrendered. Their evil partners in crime, the religious bigots, were universally reviled.
I was only a kid then, but I remember my joy and relief. Thank goodness, I thought, that the religious bigots openly aligned with the barbaric Pakistani hordes. They will now be banished forever from Bangladesh politics.
We all know that didn't come to pass. Bhuban Majhi makes this searing point especially well. I felt a renewed sense of deep anguish at the end of the film. Over four decades after independence, we're still engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to combat religious intolerance.
However, it breaks my heart to say this: Good intentions, however noble, are not enough to make a great work of art. This is where Bhuban Majhi falls lamentably short. Cinema is the most unforgiving of art forms.
The film is wonderful in parts – there's deceased Kalikaprasad Bhattacharjee's simple, enchanting music, Rana Dasgupta's fetching photography, Aparna Ghosh and Parambrata Chattopadhyay's performance. But its flaws are also considerable – Mamunur Rashid's false beard, the poorly enacted battle scenes, the unconvincing, amateurish art direction. The result, in the end, fails to reach the level of authenticity of, say, an Iranian film that I saw – Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman (Persian title Forushande). Verisimilitude is critical in narrative cinema. Five minutes into The Salesman, the viewer is sucked into the story where the absolutely amazing art direction, acting and photography combine to create a gripping illusion of having walked into the lives of a middle-class couple in Tehran. Bhuban Majhi fails to do that.
I realise now that you can hear all sorts of good things about a film, but unless you've actually seen the film, it's as risky as going on a blind date.
That said, I have absolutely no regrets about screening the film. Even with its flaws, this film is a must-see. If nothing else, it's a mark of respect to one of the most honest and thoughtful cinematic efforts I can think of to explore our Liberation War within the disturbing and compromised contemporary socio-political context.
On a different note, we have also learned a sobering lesson: Screening Bangladeshi films in Atlanta is not for the faint-hearted.
Call us masochists, but we at Seba Bangla Library are already planning to screen Aynabaji in a few months.
The writer is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians in the United States.
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