Mala Chakravorty
has a Ph.D. in American Women's fiction from I.I.T. Delhi, and Master's degrees in English and American Studies from Delhi University and Smith College, Massachusetts. She has worked in the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University,
Kolkata, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Hawai'i at
Manoa, Honolulu. She switched from academics to Information Technology in 1999, and worked at HCL Technologies, Inc. and NIIT Technologies, Inc. in Atlanta. She recently moved to Orlando, Florida, where she joined
InfoSource, Inc. as Account Executive. Apart from her academic articles, Mala's short stories have been published in
Sulekha.com and BAGA annual magazines.
A World Within a World:
15 Park Avenue
BOLLYWOOD
GUPSHUP
Director: Aparna Sen Producer: Bipin Vohra (SPS Telefilms) Story & Screenplay: Aparna Sen Cinematography: Hemant Chaturvedi Music: Viju Shah Cast: Waheeda Rehman, Shabana Azmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Shefali Shah, Rahul
Bose, Soumitra Chatterjee, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Kanwaljeet Singh
The non-existent address ‘15 Park Avenue’ is a metaphor for the alternate reality that the schizophrenic protagonist of the film is searching for...
Aparna’s Sen’s new film 15 Park Avenue is a sensitive and insightful glimpse into a world more often than not stereotypically represented in mainstream media – the heart of darkness that encompasses the mentally challenged. The non-existent address ‘15 Park Avenue’ is a metaphor for the alternate reality that the schizophrenic protagonist of the film is searching for – a virtual world that is more real to her than the physical world she inhabits.
The narrative focuses on two sisters, Anjali and
Mitali. Anjali or Anu (Shabana Azmi) is a divorced college professor, who has put her own life on hold so that she can take care of her younger sister, Mitali or Mithi
(Konkona Sen Sharma), who is epileptic and schizophrenic. Mithi believes that she has a husband named Jojo and five small children, and they all live in 15 Park Avenue. She hears voices in her head and carries on conversations with her imaginary children. She incorporates every external event, real or imagined, into this world – from a career as a journalist with The Illustrated Weekly, to a husband who has an illustrious career and travels internationally to delusional plots involving George Bush and Saddam
Hussain. Mithi is extremely frustrated by the fact that no one believes her and no one is ready to help her find her way ‘home’. The entire film is about her desperate quest for 15 Park Avenue.
Anu and Mithi’s family comprises a widowed mother
(Waheeda Rehman) and a maid. They also have a brother who has distanced himself from their problems. There is profound love between the sisters, but there is also a deep chasm. Anu has to deal with her own demons. She struggles to maintain her equilibrium while taking care of her aging mother and sick sister and coping with demands of a successful career as a noted scholar.
She is also in a romantic relationship with a colleague, Sanjeev
(Kanwaljeet Singh) who is losing his patience waiting for her to be free of her responsibilities. Above all, she has to find the time and patience to listen to Mithi’s stories -- some delusional, some real, but the line between the two is so thin that it is often not possible to extricate one from the other. Mithi tries to convey her fears and anxieties to her sister, but feels left out and rejected when the stressed-out Anu spurns her. In her despair, she grows to believe that Anu controls her and deliberately prevents her from going home to her family. Her despair leads to increasingly paranoid behavior, suicide attempts and multiple epileptic fits.
A glimpse into the past explains Mithi’s sickness. We are told that she used to be a fairly functional, albeit unstable and somewhat over-imaginative girl. She was also very creative and vibrant, worked as a journalist, and was engaged to be married to a smart young advertising executive, Joydeep Roy
(Rahul Bose), whom she called Jojo. Jojo was aware of her illness, but was ready to take on the challenge of marrying her. As a journalist, one of the assignments given to her was to uncover a story of a political unrest in a small town in Bihar. She accepted this assignment against Anjali’s wishes to prove to Jojo that she was committed to her career. In Bihar she was brutally gang-raped by some political goons. The trauma of this incident triggered off her hitherto dormant schizophrenia into a full-blown malady and eventually led to Jojo leaving her.
After this event, Mithi sinks deeper and deeper into schizophrenia, and her harried family resorts to various ways of dealing with her illness. This includes sending her to an asylum, aggressive medication, shock treatment, even getting a tantrik to try black magic on her. Nothing seems to work and her condition deteriorates. On a vacation in Bhutan the family encounters Jojo once again. He is now married with two children. Apprised of Mithi’s condition, he is wracked with guilt at having abandoned her at a time she needed his support. Mithi doesn’t recognize him, but sees in him an ally she can trust to help her find her way ‘home’ which he proceeds to do, in turn jeopardizing his own marriage.
The movie ends on a surrealistic note, open to interpretation by the viewer as to what really happens to
Mithi. While I don’t want to reveal the ending, I will say that it can be interpreted both as a happy ending and a bleak one. It may satisfy some viewers as the only appropriate resolution while leaving others perplexed, frustrated or deeply disturbed. I personally feel that there could not have been a more appropriate ending to Mithi’s story than this one.
The strength of the movie lies in the sterling performances by its ensemble female cast. Shabana Azmi lives and breathes the role of
Anjali, the intellectual professional woman who has to appear strong at all times and cope with her multiple responsibilities. Simultaneously; she has her own vulnerabilities, a failed marriage, a relationship that is not working, and a realization that life is passing her by. The way she is able to personify Anu’s struggles to handle the pressures of her day-to-day life, yet appear normal and functional is amazing. Ms Azmi’s performance lends credibility to the multiple emotions that drive Anu – the anguish, the anger, the frustration, the helplessness, the guilt, the loneliness. The pleasure she takes in her research and teaching; her mild flirtation with Mithi’s psychiatrist Kunal
(Dhritiman Chatterjee); the way she tries to bring in some joy and a semblance of normalcy into her stressful existence are utterly realistic. She brings to life every nuance of this complex role – another virtuoso performance in an illustrious career.
Then there is Konkona – it is difficult to describe her performance without resorting to hyperbole. It seems she visited psychiatrists and family members of schizophrenia patients and participated in workshops to prepare herself for her role. Her portrayal of Mithi is brilliant. Whether it’s her sing-song intonations, her pouts and scowls, grimaces and cringes, nervous body movements, or her changing appearance as the paranoia deepens, she plays the role of a mentally disturbed young woman with a rare combination of anguish, angst and elation. She brings to the character an innocence and sincerity that make us care deeply for Mithi and empathize with the helplessness of her family. Critics of Aparna Sen may accuse her of nepotism or of making this film as a showcase for her daughter’s talent, but it is difficult to imagine anyone else doing this role with as much conviction and intensity as this talented young woman. I extend my kudos to Konkona for taking on a role like this so early in her career.
Of the supporting cast, veteran Waheeda Rehman is a natural as a gracious old lady fearful of her overpowering older daughter, anguished by her younger daughter’s strange illness, pained by the dependence and helplessness that are inevitable residues of her own widowed status and old age.
The surprise package is Shefali Shah in a brief but powerful
performance as Joydeep’s wife Lakshmi who cannot understand
this sudden intrusion of her husband’s past on their present
life. Lakshmi’s growing insecurities are exquisitely
captured by Shefali who uses expressions more than words to
portray her incomprehension and anxieties. Rahul Bose tries to
make the most of a weakly defined role. Kanwaljeet, Dhritiman
and Soumitra Chatterjee lend their presence in supportive
roles in a predominantly women oriented film.
The main flaws of the film are its pace and a script that is too verbose. It is agonizingly slow at times and occasionally the tone tends to get pedantic and over-analytical. In my opinion, the use of English as the main language of communication gives the narrative a contrived feel, and results in a stilted dialogue delivery that does not flow spontaneously.
Most of the time, characters use Convent-school mandated sentences that sound artificial; on the few occasions when they slip into Hindi or Bengali the effect is far more authentic. To Sen’s credit, she selected English as her medium because it is a language spoken by a large section of urban Indians, as in her earlier films, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) and Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002). I feel that some more attention paid to maintain ethnic, class, and generational nuances in the diction and vocabulary would have made a considerable difference to the totality of the effect.
Other flaws: long winded medical explanations of schizophrenia, while necessary to create awareness and dispel myths, distances the viewers from the characters and gives it a feel of a documentary film. Although it is difficult to demystify a little known disease without taking away from the narrative, one would have expected more showing and less telling from a director of Sen’s sensitivity.
Some plot contrivances are also redundant. I don’t think that it was necessary for Mithi to be gang-raped – that too in Bollywood style by political goons in Bihar – as a trigger for her paranoia. Why show the mad beggar woman on the street repeatedly as a metaphor of Mithi’s deteriorating mental state? Why use the party scene just before the climax as a forum to discuss godmen and their extra sensory powers? There are also several sub-plots left open-ended, which makes the viewer wonder if these were introduced simply to give a character background, or if they hold any significance for the main narrative. For instance, did Mithi’s condition have anything to do with genetics, considering she was born to an older woman? Why did Anu’s first marriage break up? How could Anu let Mithi go to Bihar on her own? What was the deal with Kunal’s marriage and his obvious attraction to
Anu? What was really going on in Joydeep and Lakshmi’s relationship? The end product is a loose and unwieldy narrative.
However, flaws notwithstanding, 15 Park Avenue is evocatively beautiful. One needs to ‘feel’ the film emotionally more than view it rationally, and the redundancies, the sluggish pace don’t really matter. It we allow ourselves to do so, we will step into a world within our own world -- one we don’t know much about unless we have had any kind of personal experience with it. And it is not a pretty world! The frothing epileptic fits, the vomiting and urinating, the bloodied thighs of a mentally challenged young girl who has been raped, the deadening after-effects of medication, the tremors of shock treatment, are presented in all their sordid reality. The real world is dark and frightening, yet it also has warm moments of love and caring. The focus is on Mithi’s illness, but we also see the relationships between the sisters, between mother and daughters, we get glimpses into their outer world. Sen uses humor and irony to offset the grit and gore in Mithi’s life. Superb cinematography, subtle background music, great voiceovers, television programs, modern Kolkata interiors, cafés and restaurants, the scenic beauty of Bhutan, the wooded log cabins, provide the backdrop of the light and darkness that make up Mithi’s unreal world and Anu’s real one.
The overall effect is eerily surreal. If we take on Mithi’s challenge to
Anu, “how would you feel if someone told you that you were not a professor, you are only imagining it” as the starting point for the many discussions between the characters as to what is real and what is delusional, it leads one to think of alternate realities, of virtual worlds that can exist within the human mind that may be more real than the physical world we live in. It brings to mind issues of faith, of ideologies, of belief and disbelief that make up human existence and its multiple layers of realities. A glimpse into Mithi’s world can lead us to question our own existence and the dreams and passions that drive us. How are these more real and more meaningful than Mithi’s imaginary children crying out for her and her yearning to get home to them? Can we ever understand what it feels not to fit in and what it means to care for someone who the world sees as ‘abnormal’? Are we in a position to make value judgments on anyone or anything? If we juxtapose our life with Mithi’s or Anu’s we start questioning the very meaning of our own existence!
This thought provoking film is definitely not for the masses. Anyone looking for entertainment should be warned that this is a movie that brings to life with searing intensity a world inhabited by marginalized people. If you cannot stomach that, give it a miss!
