BY: Sanya Gupta
What is love?
There is no one definition of love. It isn’t something that is set in stone. Love can mean different things to different people. It redefines everything you thought you knew. Love is beautiful, but it isn’t always. It can be destructive and ugly. It can become the most self-invasive feeling that you may ever feel. Srijit Mukherji’s avant-garde Bengali film is an artful exploration of love and how vulnerable it makes people. The film revolves around four tales of love, each exploring different emotions of love, woven together by a woman played by Sushmita Sen.
The first story is about a loner jazz musician who is consumed with self-love and is alienated from the world around him. He pampers himself all the time and doesn’t care about what is going around him. He spends hours taking showers and grooming himself. He even celebrates his birthday alone by not only singing the birthday song for himself but also by lathering his face with a cake. The only person he interacts with is a young woman whom he meets under a big tree at the park sometimes.
The second story is between the tree and Sushmita Sen. Sen visits the tree almost every day and spends hours sitting under it fighting with her boyfriend who is working in Mumbai. The tree cares deeply for Sen and that is portrayed by a bizarre lovemaking scene between sen and the tree. YES, YOU READ THAT CORRECT! Nothing is impossible in the world of Nirbaak and the story keeps getting weird yet interesting by the minute.
The third story is all about sen’s boyfriend’s pet bhingi who is not so happy when Sen moves in with her owner. Viewers who own pets might find this story a little disturbing. Bingi becomes extremely jealous of her owner’s girlfriend. Bhingi refuses to eat from sen’s hands, barks and attacks at her and even insists Rahul take her on a walk alone. The third story leads to a series of some bizarre events that gets us to the final and the most unsettling plot of the movie.
The fourth tale revolves around Ritwick Chakraborty who works as a morgue worker. When a corpse of a young woman is brought into the morgue, ritwick finds himself getting attracted to the corpse. He starts dreaming of a life with the corpse and even lets himself to believe that he will marry it.
Nirbaak which means speechless in Bengali is a film that experiments with the silence between different expressions of love and tells us how love can sometimes take a dangerous turn and cause complete loss of you who thought you were. It is Sushmita Sen’s first Bengali movie and she has shone in most of the parts. She has brought her A-game to this challenging storyline. Anjan Dutta has done commendable work.
It is a movie that is ahead of its time and it challenges the audience to get out of their comfort zones and experience love, jealousy and alienation like never before. The stories will make you cringe but will leave you wanting for more. The plot will stay with you forever and Mukherji’s unapologetic direction will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the movie. It’s a must watch for everyone who enjoys a good piece of fictional love story every now and then.
Tabeer 