Movies

MOVIES: THE SOULFUL STILLNESS OF PURATAWN

by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri April 17 2025, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins, 30 secs

Suman Ghosh’s new film marks the return of Sharmila Tagore to Bengali cinema after a long hiatus. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri writes about the film and its engagement with memory and time…

Puratawn, directed by acclaimed Bengali filmmaker Suman Ghosh, is a landmark in Indian regional cinema that beautifully explores themes of memory, ageing, and time. Featuring a career-defining performance by legendary actress Sharmila Tagore, this Bengali-language film is set across evocative locations in Kolkata and Meghalaya, including ancestral mansions, root bridges, and ancient caves. With a haunting background score by Alokananda Dasgupta and cinematography by Ravi Kiran Ayyagari, Puratawn stands out as one of the best new Indian films to watch in 2025. For audiences searching for powerful Indian dramas, silent storytelling in film, or award-winning Bengali movies, Puratawn is a must-watch. It offers a soulful viewing experience that blends art-house aesthetics with emotionally resonant storytelling, perfect for cinephiles exploring modern Indian cinema.

You wait, with memories drifting,

For the something that made life blessed,

The mighty, the rare, the uplifting,

The awaking of stones, the rifting

That opened deeps unguessed.

The books in your shelves are staring

Golden and brown, as you muse

On the lands you crossed in your faring,

On pictures, on visions unsparing

Of the people you had to lose.

All at once it comes back: now you know!

Trembling, you rise, all aware

Of a year once long ago

With its grandeur and fear and prayer.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Remembrance’

A Birthday Forgotten, A Memory Revisited

Mrs Sen enters the stately room accompanied by her daughter Ritika, Ritika’s estranged husband Rajeev, and the house-help Hira. The three of them have taken pains to adorn the room with objects from Mrs Sen’s past. It’s her birthday, though in the conversation immediately preceding the sequence, it is apparent that Mrs Sen does not remember that. She moves around the room, picking up a stick, looking through a kaleidoscope, the hint of a smile of remembrance (or is it?) on her lips, running her frail hands over a musical instrument, sitting down at a table and fiddling with the knobs of an ancient radio, getting up and flipping through an old magazine, tapping the keys to a harmonium that has survived time, leafing through a notebook of songs and musical notations, a pair of old spectacles, picking up a box (the box that shall not be opened because not all secrets need to be revealed, not all mysteries explained) that she puts away carefully in a cupboard, before proceeding to sit down at the head of the table as her daughter and son-in-law move to stand behind her. She takes her daughter’s hand in hers.

This penultimate sequence, running close to six minutes, an absolutely riveting and moving climax to a film that brims over with an embarrassment of similarly understated gems, plays out without a word spoken. Sharmila Tagore’s wizened face and her eloquent eyes do all the talking (in the sequence immediately following this, her daughter says something to the effect that she has never witnessed such ‘tripti’ on her mother’s face ever – and one reflects with a start how Sharmila’s face actually conveys the word tripti to a T).

Adding to the unforgettable resonance of the sequence is Alokananda Dasgupta’s music that captures every nuance of the character’s inner life, as it were. It’s a rare jugalbandi between an actor and a composer, one giving the other her cue, the other returning the favour. Not a note out of place. As the actor herself told me over a conversation –it’s entirely Suman Ghosh’s vision; he envisaged the whole sequence as it stands. Thahrao. Stillness. I lay great store by this word, and how any work of art, howsoever urgent, has to allow the viewer the stillness to contemplate, to breathe, to reflect. In an era where we often confuse pacing with a film’s rhythm, this sequence shows what great art can be like.

The Finest Five Minutes of a Legendary Career

I have watched this sequence five to six times, and even now, writing about it, I feel the choking sensation I experienced when I first watched Puratawn. It might be blasphemous to say so for an actor whose credits include Apur Sansar, Devi, Nayak, Aranyer Din Ratri, Mausam, and Namkeen, but let me go out on a limb here: these are the finest five minutes of Sharmila Tagore’s career. It’s magnificent. But it’s a magnificence that does not call attention to itself. It is self-effacing. It flows like a subterranean river seeping into the viewer’s consciousness.

I have admired Suman’s work from the first time I watched Bosu Poribar, and then his entire filmography, and I can say this with conviction: Puratawn is his finest. This is what all his previous works were leading up to. And that is saying something about a filmmaker who has to his name films like Poddokkhep, Peace Haven, Kadambari, Shyamal Kaku, Bosu Poribar, to name a few.

Puratawn has echoes of many of these earlier outings. The sequence described above is a spiritual sister to a similar silent one in Kadambari. There is in Puratawn the spareness that he gave us in Shyamal Kaku, one that distils the narrative of all flab so that what you get is a direct connect to the heart of the matter, so to speak. The mansion in Puratawn carries the resonance of a similar stately house in Bosu Poribar, a house that is as much a character in the film, a house that has seen its inhabitants play out their daily lives, and whose walls, if one cares to listen, could tell you a thing or two about time and forgetting.

Time, Ageing, and the Cinematic Gaze

Few contemporary filmmakers get the essence of time, ageing, and memory, and are able to put that across on screen like Suman does. I have written about this in an essay on his films with Soumitra Chatterjee. He is at the top of his skills as a writer and director in the way he does that in Puratawn. With the creepers that wrap the mansion in their ageless folds. The gnarled trees of the root bridge in Meghalaya from which, in an inspired sequence, the cinematographer (Ravi Kiran Ayyagari) moves to the veins on Mrs Sen’s shrivelled skin as she is sleeping. The depths of the ancient Lymput caves, again in Meghalaya, which, as Rajeev says, have not been touched by the sun for millennia. Much like the storeroom that houses the detritus of a lifetime of memories hoarded. Of course, in this endeavour, he is helped by the star of the film, its composer Alokananda Dasgupta, whose background score plays like an elegy to memory and time.

In the magnificence of the background score and Sharmila Tagore’s performance (it’s interesting how she plays out three different phases: her present self that lives in the past, her present self when she is lucid and knows her bearings, and her persona in the flashbacks to an earlier era, which Suman approaches creatively without getting a younger actor to stand in for Sharmila, thus providing another dimension to the character), one is likely to overlook the all-round brilliance of the rest of the cast.

The Ensemble That Makes the Film

If Sharmila excels, it’s because of what Rituparna Sengupta, Indraneil Sengupta, and Brishti Roy bring to the table. Rituparna, in particular, is heart-breaking in the way she navigates her incomprehension of her mother’s state. Her inner anguish is palpable on her face as she realizes that her doctor friend knows more about her mother than probably she, the daughter, does. Consider the sequence when she is confronted with her mother preparing the lunchbox for the ‘school-going’ Ritika. She plays along happily with the make-believe till the time Mrs Sen carries her to the ‘bus stand’ holding her hand (and then her face almost crumples with the realization that her mother is not ‘present’).

Or that her husband, with the ghosts of whose past too she has to deal, probably understands her mother better. As is apparent in the sequence where Rajeev feeds an intractable Mrs Sen who will not have her morsel till ‘that other woman’ (in the mirror) is fed. Indraneil is absolutely brilliant in this scene, or for that matter, when he finds Mrs Sen who has gone walkabout. It’s only in hindsight that you realize what he brings to the film. A solidity, the ability to be unperturbed by what unfolds before him, a calmness, much like the ancient trees that are so much a part of the narrative. If Sharmila Tagore is the enigmatic soul of the film, Indraneil Sengupta is its beating heart.

Then there’s Brishti Roy, the scene-stealer in every sense of the word. Her interactions with Sharmila Tagore are a delight, and there’s no doubt that she enables the legend’s performance in no small manner. That’s no mean achievement.

A Film That Lingers

It’s a rare film that makes your heart soar and sink at the same time. That makes it overflow with joy and plumb the depths of ‘what-ifs’ in the same breath. Suman’s perfectly choreographed world – take a bow Aditya Vikram, Ravi Kiran, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Angelica Bhowmick, Alokananda Dasgupta – does that. This is a film that you carry with you long after you have watched it.

That makes you reflect on Rilke’s memorable lines:

It would be good to give much thought,

Before you try to find words for something so lost…

We’re still reminded—: sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on…