Director: Mrinal Sen; Writer: Mrinal Sen; Cinematographer: Shashi Anand; Cast: Victor Bannerjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Anjan Dutt, Aparna Sen, Geeta Sen, Anasuya Majumdar
Summary: With this film Sen returned to his most
congenial setting, Calcutta, and to one of his
favourite plot formulas: the sudden
disappearance of a family member causes the
others to reflect on themselves and their lives.
Here Sen considers the lives of a Bengali
middle-class family against the background of
‘the new world order’ with the defeat of the
USSR in the cold war and the unification of
Germany. When the elderly mother (G. Sen) of
a Calcutta family hangs herself, her husband (S.
Chatterjee), her youngest son (Dutta), her
mentally unbalanced daughter (Majumdar) and
her widowed daughter-in-law (A.Sen) are
distraught but do not have the courage to read
the old woman’s diary. When the eldest son
(Bannerjee) returns from Germany, his anxious
questioning brings to light the disorientation
experienced by the family and the way world
history penetrates into the fabric of individual
lives. In the end the daughter, with silent anger
and resentment, burns the mother’s diary,
unread.
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