Director: Mrinal Sen; Writer: Mrinal Sen; Producer: Jagadish and Pushpa Chokhani; Cinematographer: K.K. Mahajan; Cast: Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Geeta Sen, Pankaj Kapoor, Annu Kapoor, Sreela Majumdar, Rajen Tarafdar
Duration: 01:40:28; Aspect Ratio: 1.345:1; Hue: 52.582; Saturation: 0.040; Lightness: 0.311; Volume: 0.169; Cuts per Minute: 6.867; Words per Minute: 39.103
Summary: Three friends from the city visit some ruins
where an aged mother (Sen) and her daughter
Jamini (Azmi) live. The mother awaits the
arrival of a distant cousin to marry Jamini but
the man is already married and living in
Calcutta. The photographer Subhash (Shah)
takes pity on the family and pretends to be the
awaited suitor. The mother dies contented but
when the threesome leave again, Jamini stays
behind facing a life of loneliness in the ruins.
The second Sen film to receive a Hindi release,
its passive storyline and heavy emphasis on
meaningful looks was a major departure from
his political cinema of the 70s. Sen commented
that ‘The film is partly memory and partly
fantasy punctuated by bits of instant
happenings’, and created an expressionist set
of broken walls and ruins to replicate the
woman’s state of mind. Claiming the influence
of Robert Bresson, he also said that with this
film he finally put the IPTA influence behind
him, something he had aimed to do since the
communist government returned to power in
Bengal in 1977 which made the IPTA aesthetic
into official policy.
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