by Ria Banerjee
Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s sophomore cinematic venture Jonaki (Firefly)(2018) is nothing if not avant-garde in its visceral exploration of the deceptive nature of memories. His first film, Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love)(2014) foregrounded the triumph of love which can thrive despite temporal constraints. The transformative potential of cinema is best exemplified in such a movie that abandons the usage of words and captures the drudgery of human existence with artistic precision. If Asha Jaoar Majhe is a testament to love flourishing in the absence of physical proximity, Jonaki is a heart-wrenching tale of the inevitable fallout of such an absence. Absence is a haunting presence in its own right- this absence is concretized cinematically in both the literal and metaphorical terrains of interpretation. The movie is rooted in the director’s personal traumatic experience when his maternal grandmother lay in a comatose state before she passed away.
He was haunted by nightmares which he himself had claimed in an interview to have been “too painful”. Jonaki, then, can be interpreted as an imaginative retelling of those very nightmares that Sengupta was afflicted with. The narrative needs to be extracted from a montage of filmic images that resist linear depictions of time and space. The titular character of Jonaki, essayed by Lolita Chatterjee, negotiates traumatic memories of her past as she lies on her deathbed. The octogenarian is caught in transit between reality and memory- fleeting images capture moments of love, loss, heartache, and marital estrangement as they might have appeared in her life. This past-visually captured through dilapidated mansions, outdated gadgets like landline telephones, and record-player- conjure a decadent world enshrouded in mystery and nostalgia. Jonaki is reprimanded by her overbearing mother (essayed by Ratnabali Bhattacharjee) due to her growing romantic inclinations for a Christian lover (played by Jim Sarbh). Jonaki’s marriage to a rich and nonchalant man is a commentary on the inadequacy of human interaction when love and desire remain unreciprocated. Ironically enough, Jonaki’s failed marriage mirrors the dysfunctional conjugal space of her parents.
The monkish rigidity of Jonaki’s boarding school betrays a curious symmetry. Sengupta deploys symmetry to undercut the fluidity of memory, thereby creating a visually powerful narrative. Sengupta’s treatment of nostalgia is hard-hitting in that this nostalgia is not romanticised; neither is it comforting. Sengupta quite strategically makes the octogenarian play her younger self- a technical improvisation rather unusual as flashbacks often deploy younger actors to play their former selves. Such a choice can be attributed to Sengupta’s astute understanding of human nature were reminiscing as a cognitive category always involves viewing others, never oneself. The diegesis moves forward on the twin wheels of graphic imagery and metaphor taken to its extreme. The abundance of metaphors- oranges, toy soldiers as tokens of remembrance, an all-engulfing fire that suggests the ruthless termination of desires-assist the conflation of reality and fantasy as it plays out in the movie. Unlike Asha Jaoar Majhe, Jonaki does make use of limited dialogue- however, it is in the treatment of silence that the movie seems to come alive. Silence never interrupts the diegesis; it is rather an integral component of the narrative that unfolds through gestures and a symbolic interplay of light and shadow.
Sengupta’s Jonaki delineates the attendant precariousness of the act of remembering. Memories are a storehouse of fragmented experiences- transmitting such an experience on celluloid can only be achieved by presenting the character itself as a ruptured being. The elusively meditative texture of Jonaki transports the audience to a surreal world- a world where the pain is tangible and memory is a liminal site of eternal ambiguity and interstices.
About the Author:
Ria Banerjee is an M.A. (First Class First) in English Literature from Shri Shikshayatan College, affiliated with Calcutta University. She is currently engaged as a faculty in Prafulla Chandra College, Department of English.