A woman who walks into a hospital room starts airily talking of the flowers that the guests leave behind, that eventually wilt and start letting off a musty fragrance. There is a dense weight that hangs on in the air, as she goes on and on even as those around her edgily shift around on their toes and try hard to concur with her through a nod, or an occasional smile.
There is an audacity that is of the right-on-your-face kind that makes Rituparno Ghosh’s ‘Dosar’ a highly distinct emotional drama that deals with the complexity that underlies seemingly straightforward human relationships. Here is a film maker who is without doubt a master when it comes to sketching the intricacies of the human mind, and in ‘Dosar’, he deftly explores a lardy theme as fidelity.
Kaberi (Konkona Sen Sharma) finds the world around her crashing down when she receives a call from the hospital that her husband Koushik (Prosenjit Chatterjee) has just about survived a car accident. What leaves her terribly distraught however is the news that her husband was with Mia ((Chandrayee Ghosh), a colleague with whom he had been having an affair, at the time of the accident and that she had passed away on the spot.
As Koushik starts threading back the beads of what is left of his life, he realizes that he is less remorseful and more grief stricken that Mia isn’t around any more. Kaberi on the other hand, is torn between an almost vengeful desire to abandon her husband and an insuppressible sense of obligation that keeps dragging her back into the marriage.
Ghosh’s casting is one that always leaves you astonished, and in ‘Dosar’ there is hardly an actor around whom you wouldn’t take note of. Konkona Sen Sharma is mindbogglingly good, and there is the ever dependable Prosenjit who is as good as ever. Shot in stark black and white, Ghosh’s ‘Dosar’ is one film that is compelling to the core.
Verdict: Good