15 Park Avenue (2005)
Director: Aparna Sen
Duration: 02:04:42; Aspect Ratio: 1.667:1; Hue: 20.962; Saturation: 0.071; Lightness: 0.350; Volume: 0.087; Cuts per Minute: 7.418; Words per Minute: 6.175
Summary: An exploration of the impact of schizophrenia on a young woman and her family in today's Calcutta. The narrative pivots around the relationship of two sisters, older sister Anjali is a successful professor with a powerful personality. She is the anchoring rock for her family and carer for her sister Meethi whose progression into schizophrenia has been speed ed up by traumatic experiences. Anjali has always dominated the life of her attractive younger sister, and jealously warded off Meethi's handsome fiancé Jojo with fear of Meethi's impending illness. Years later when Meethi and Anjali are on holiday in the Hills there is a chance meeting with Jojo, now with his new wife and children. He is shocked to discover that Meethi does not now recognize him, but lives in a world visited by an imaginary husband and children of her own.
Meethi's unnamed condition prefigured in the film through footage of Bush's famous WMD speech -- imagining something that isn't there.
mental health
schizophrenia
schizophrenia
women
Anu hears voices; Meethi's auditory hallucinations.
The debate between Anu and her partner Sanjeev about hospitalizing Meethi versus giving her care at home.
Meethi's "exorcism" contrasted with Anu's physics lecture suggests a tension between the biomedical/scientific reason-based model of treatment and the religious/faith-based one.
"You're always imagining everyone's against you." Meethi's imagined accounts fuse with reality but she is an unreliable narrator.
Meethi's suicide attempt.
Psychiatric care and case history as told by primary caregiver in flashback.
A discussion about ECT pitting the caregiver against the doctor.
Administration of ECT -- markedly different from the usual melodramatic depictions of the therapy.
The organic nature of schizophrenia and the difference between reality and fantasy.
The details of Meethi's condition and treatment presented to her suitor Joydeep.
- "Nothing seemed abnormal" -- latent schizophrenia: the normal-abnormal continuum.
Meethi's seizures and treatment on holiday.
The omniscient God man as a schizophrenic who hears voices.
The omniscient God man as a schizophrenic who hears voices.
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