Jacksonville Film Festival 2009

In a trailer, a woman who used to be an alternate on her high school tennis team beats her boyfriend senseless once a week. Meanwhile, an eight-year-old girl experiences an awakening that makes her wonder if the guy next door driving the ‘89 Subaru is, in fact, the guy she thinks he is. On the other side of the tracks, Kobe beefsteaks and manicured gardens go hand in hand, a man of privilege has an epiphany at the dinner table that ultimately leads to a contusion and a revelation. Told in three subtly related segments, featuring a cast of mostly non-professionals and exploring passive racism, geo-political vagaries, good intentions, faith and disappointment, this deeply personal film manages to tread the lines between vulgar and humane, between absurd and tender, and finds its heart in the story segment featuring the director’s own daughter and a man living in a van.

Chaturanga is the story of a love that is caught between conflicting worlds of ideas. The lead protagonist Sachish fleets from radical positivism to religious mysticism in his quest for life's meaning. However, his search ultimately yields nothing but crushing disillusionment. This is because he cannot square his abstract ideals with the powerful presences of two women in his life. One of them is Damini, a young Hindu widow, and the other is Nanibala, the abandoned mistress of Sachish's own brother. Sachish tries to convince himself that Nanibala is simply a helpless woman who needs to be 'rescued' by him. Similarly, during his later religious phase, he pretends that the widow Damini is merely an enticement of Nature that must be avoided at all costs for spiritual salvation. Chaturanga thus becomes, after a point, a psychodrama of unbelievable cruelty. Nanibala becomes a victim of it because as a 'fallen woman' she can only be 'saved', but her humanity cannot be recognized. Damini is first given away by her dying husband, along with all her property, to a religious guru. She then falls in love with Sachish who can accept her only without her sexuality. Set in Colonial Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century, the film weaves a rich tapestry of crisscrossing desires and moralities.Based on the novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Rabindranath Tagore, Chaturanga is directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay, one of the most exciting and promising young filmmakers working in India at present.Chaturanga, based on the book by Rabindranath Tagore, is Suman Mukhopadhyay's second feature film. In 2005, Suman completed his first feature film, Herbert, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya. The film was given the National Award for Best Regional Film. He has also been conferred with awards like the Most Promising Director (BFJA), Best Debut Director (Lankesh Award) and Audience Award in the Dhaka International Film Festival. Herbert has been screened in a number of national and international film festivals including Cannes, Florence, Bangkok, Osian Cinefan, Zanzibar, Mumbai, Pune and Kerala. Suman has done his film training from the New York Film Academy, USA. He is currently scripting 'The Hungry Tide,' based on the novel by Amitav Ghosh.Suman is also one of the best young theater directors working in India at present, having done productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces.Chaturanga is of course a drama. It is a melodrama in the good sense of the term. In other words, melos or music in this film creates a soundscape to accompany the drama of human relations. Music expresses longings and desires that are either repressed or culturally and politically forbidden. Chaturanga deals with questions, which are contemporary and timeless. It interrogates our perception of the human evolution. Chaturanga does not provide a single reference to the contemporary political situation. Perhaps Rabindranath was trying to address deeper concerns regarding human ethos and codes of our existence. In the film, protagonist Sachish metamorphoses from a staunch rationalist to a devout spiritualist.Nonetheless, there is an immense reversal in Sachish's viewpoint at the end of the film. We, as social beings, have tried to solve all our moral, social and political dilemmas in accordance to the model of diametric opposites. East-West, Left-Right, Normal-Abnormal, Discipline-Punish for example. Rabindranath himself, at one point of time, was a victim of the similar ideological closures. Nevertheless, Rabindranath undertook many journeys in his life, journeys that allowed him to transcend his previous position.We have shamefully observed the disasters of experimentations with human beings. In our archeology of knowledge, we have seen the quest of human mind to attain an order through religion or benevolence or coercion or moderation or collectivism. We are yet to reach any durable 'resolution.' Nevertheless, any attempt to harness the spirit of human nature, any effort to negate the undefined areas of our inner world only reveals the holes in the ideological models. Therefore, Chaturanga proposes an unending journey, timeless quest.