Director: Mrinal Sen; Writer: Mrinal Sen, Saddat Hassan Manto; Producer: NFDC, Doordarshan; Cinematographer: Shashi Anand; Editor: Mrinmoy Chakraborty; Cast: Anjan Dutt, Dimple Kapadia, Deepti Roy, Kajal Gupta, Amal Mukherjee, Satya Bandyopadhyay
Duration: 01:27:14; Aspect Ratio: 1.290:1; Hue: 332.530; Saturation: 0.037; Lightness: 0.200; Volume: 0.106; Cuts per Minute: 5.513; Words per Minute: 30.764
Summary: A warmly lit, vividly coloured love story about
a young writer in search of inspiration in an old
country mansion. He strikes up a telephonic
relationship with an anonymous woman caller,
isolated in her lavish urban flat. The interaction
provides the writer with materials for a new
fiction. The viewer, however, is shown
something of the woman’s life: she is the
mistress of a wealthy old man (who remains
absent from the film) and thus supports her
lower middle-class family. The ending deploys
a device familiar from Bengali short stories as
the two protagonists meet each other in a train
compartment where the melody of his voice
allows her a moment of recognition. Sen
weaves allusions to Tagore’s Kshudita Pashan
into the narrative, but the film seems to hinge
on an exploration of what is shown or voiced
and what is unspoken or absent.
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