Movie Review - Agantuk (The stranger)
Ray was always lyrical in his movies- he nurtured his characters with
love, finding nuggets of gold in even the darkest corners. he was
always controlled in his treatment…one does not find in ray the
screaming hysteria of ritwik ghatak, the obvious political overtones
of mrinal sen.at a time when calcutta was fraught with ultra leftist
politics, he cast a longing,loving nostalgic look at the bygone days
of the zamindars,in jalsaghar. while student bodies piled up in the
narrow dank by-lanes of calcutta,ray played out his pipe dream of food
falling from the skies in goopy gain bagha bain. ray was certainly the
most european of all great indian directors- he was detachedly funny,
loving but loving only as a third person,never embracing with clasped
hands.
in agantuk,it seems that the director,on his deathbed, cries at last.
he gushes forth, looking back at his own culture, at his idea of the
perfect man, and realises that after having conquered the world from
bengal to france,having looked into the depths of culture and
character, the only solution is the wild cry of the caveman. he gives
utpal dutt his voice, and takes us into the dream of the globetrotter,
the traveller without bond, a man with the burden of science and
extreme cultural training craving to be primitive,and nothing more.
utpal dutt has lived with the machiguenga, fallen sick in the amazon
and woken up cured in africa…and yet he realises that for all his
love for the primitive, for all his alienation from the ten thousand
years of social progress, he is yet a tribal only in theory, only in
reflection, his education and family have left their indelible mark on
his life, he can only look in terrific awe at the greatest drawing in
human history-the bison in the cave- but he can never draw it.
the theme of the film is his brief sojourn to calcutta, where he meets
his niece after thirty long years. he is an offshoot of the family
that has been long forgotten. as the niece and her rather smart but
nice husband try to judge his authenticity, they grope towards an
appreciation of the man…the magician with incredible tales and an
eye that glares ferociously from having seen the end of the world.
i love ray, and i love him for the personal testament he left in this
movie. but i prefer not to deify him. as a viewer, i immediately
criticise his questioning of modernity, his looking back at
primitiveness. the particular standoff between the modern and the
primitive is at heart a modernist question, deafeating its very
intention. only a modern man with cultural and political forces
tearing him apart into splinters can revert back to what he perceives
as the central unity among fragments, that is primitivity. ray sounds
contrived when he denounces the atomic bomb and with it all of
civilization, he sounds strangely contradictory when he defends tribal
mumbo jumbo and shamanism, only to lecture his young admirers on the
lunar eclipse,and the importance of not being a “kupa-manduka”. in one
of the films disturbing scenes, utpal dutt sits watching a group of
santhals dancing, distanced like a mere viewer, the dancing forced and
pretentious.
ray gives this last film, made just before he died, the cathartic cry
of a genius who wants to speak finally, after having observed for so
long. one is immediately recalled to mozart’s feverish composition of
the requiem on his deathbed…the child genius gave his life to that
immortal opus, and died immediately afterwards, spent and useless. ray
is a saint in his conviction, a child in his logic, chaotic,
contradictory, narrow, loving and forgiving- in short he is almost
primitive in his innocence. “agantuk” then is a movie for dreamers and
those who have loved ray… not to be deconstructed too heavily but
only to be cherished.
