A tribute to Atanu Ghosh, a maestro of sensitive filmmaking, on his birth anniversary.

If love is a disease, it sets off a metastasis as one drifts down the memory lane of (and often with) an old love. On this premise, begins filmmaker Atanu Ghosh’s ‘Robibaar’ (2019). The movie follows an encounter between once-lovers Sayani (Jaya Ahsan), a law officer, and Asimabho (Prosenjit Chatterjee), a habitual and perhaps even a professional fraudster, spanning the eponymous Sunday. Within the 115 minutes of its runtime, Ghosh unfurls a cinematic herbarium of unjaded romance that cross-examines our understanding of love. It explores a love that preserves a desiccated past between the careful folds of the present. It asks: Is honesty a prerequisite of love or can it also thrive on deception? A modern heart that has sent text messages to another ‘by mistake’, after years of non-communication, knows.

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The film’s charm lies in the oppositional characterisation of the lone protagonists—a centripetally reserved Sayani leading a formulaically organised life and a centrifugally suave Asimabho who continuously disrupts it. This contrast is further reinforced through the situational correlates of their names. While Sayani’s name comes up in reference to her books on Law, Asimabho’s name is pronounced only once when he commits an unlawful act. Through their brilliant body language, expressions, and dialogue-delivery, the actors breathe life into these contrary personalities. Then it’s hardly surprising that the love they share too is stained by such opposing forces.

A Trial of Love’s Aporias

Like the weekly Sunday, the movie too breaks out of the customary. Upon entering Asimabho’s bedroom, Sayani reassures her father over the phone that though out of practice, she hasn’t forgotten playing chess. The audience immediately reads the subtext of their out- of-touch love being expressed in a confrontational idiom. Thus begins Ghosh’s courtroom-like narrative technique. Serving fifteen years apart, the duo are summoned to face their
feelings for each other—questioning, arguing, countering. Each calls the other’s bluffs. If Asimabho’s deception is more explicit, Sayani’s lies in throttling her love even as she finds herself drawn to him by some invisible string. Their journey feels as long-drawn and inconsequential as any trial but with no clear accused/victim binary. Each is shown presenting a separate narrative, yet sharing the same loneliness. Love tries their identities by
dissolving their individuality (their names are hardly mentioned more than once) into the common endearing address of tumi (meaning you, suggesting familiarity) by which they refer to each other. Yet their trial is really a cross-examination of love.

Putting deception at the centre even through the many mask-hung walls against which the two converse, the film portrays a well-sustained interpenetration of love and fraudulency. If Asimabho’s company Amour Associates (hereafter AA) was fake, at least the consummation of their love within its premises was true. True, even if they were never bound by the legal institution of marriage as he was to his former wife, Ronita, whom he had married only for profit. Again, several frauds of his were overlooked for years only because of an officer’s romance with Ronita. By the end, both Sayani and Asimabho save each other (hence their love) through deceptive acts. Deception almost metamorphoses into love when in a masterly scene, a forged document seems to come out of Sayani’s bag as love letters. One wonders: is love that which never lies, or which even in taking fraudulent detours pulsates unceasing?

Again, by referring to sudden deaths, Alice Munro’s fortuity-themed ‘Dear Life’, and never quite revealing if their ‘sudden’ encounter was staged by Asimabho or not, the film asks: is love a natural accident or a cerebral fabrication? The answer remains camouflaged in Kolkata’s greenery that both sustains and stands for their re-blossoming romance. They are wandering, curious lovers, they are Adam and Eve, cursed with the travails of love (the film has an epigraph on this theme). One wonders if the origami folds of their fabrications are like the fertiliser a gardener is shown using that sustains their relationship which might otherwise have withered. Thus, the seemingly self-serving deal which they ultimately devise, where he must confess his criminal history, is but a means for Sayani to trust Asimabho again. As his hands go up claiming innocence at the end of a magic trick, it resembles a surrender for there is no acquittal from the bind of love.

Languid Folds of Meaning

Be it a fraud case peeking from the morning newspaper Sayani picks up or the yellow ‘Caution’ sign in the café where Asimabho will accost her, as the film unfolds, a well-orchestrated cinematics of symbolism gets revealed. The AA premises they revisit, actually an unfinished building, where a significant amount of actions take place, literally becomes the site where they can rebuild their incomplete relationship. Again, Sayani’s research about fraudulent minds turns into her search for a reason that’s enough to either make her stay or
leave Asimabho permanently. Thus, her decision to add a new chapter to her work later in the movie holds the possibility of adding one to her love life too. All this happens with a controlled slowness. At times a bit unwarranted, this powerfully extricates the audience from their fast-paced life and forces them to face the discomforting resurfacing of their own suppressed feelings.

In this verbally economic movie, the soundscape significantly shoulders the responsibility of meaning-making. If the unpredictability of the day’s weather announced by the radio seems well-tuned to the waves of frustration and attachment the two experience all through, then ringtones and car-stereos jump into (and thus underscore) the void of their lives. At crucial moments, the narrative meaningfully breaks into songs and scores (both Indian and Western) composed by Debojyoti Mishra. Especially noteworthy is a musical refrain that appears to be attached to the overconfident Asimabho but soon becomes a general motif of artfulness.

Cinematographer Appu Prabhakar’s sympathetic camera treats the characters with utmost delicacy. Sometimes, a hand-held camera takes kinematic cues from the characters’ movements. At others, it hovers over empty spaces or plays with the focus to establish the theme of loneliness. The uneasily discreet positions from with many scenes are shot reinstates the arcane nature of these deceptive hearts. A particular long shot performs its magic where the two continue to push a car that has run out of fuel, much like their broken relationship. Again, the frequent use of jump cuts challenges the import of time that unlike humans, moves on. This is expressed in a breath taking scene where Sayani’s stillness is captured against a moving train that, instead of Asimabho, she lets go.

Aesthetics of Unmeaning

Ghosh creates an aesthetics of unmeaning through deliberate narrative gaps, fragmentations, and excesses to capture the aporias of Sayani and Asimabho’s love that plays out like a dream even without the dream sequence with which the movie opens. Be it a car-racing scene that seems out of place in the otherwise subdued film or the apparent gaps of strange baristas and superfast-reading editors, the actions frequently lean towards the bizarre. The fleeting presence or mention of children (even one who goes missing and is easily forgotten) across the movie seems to mirror Sayani’s subconscious which is revealed to be haunted by the memory of a child. Flouting the generic norm of using flashbacks in portraying such romances, Ghosh uniquely assigns monologues to Asimabho the time frame of which floats about ambiguously—sometimes as disruptive scenes and sometimes as voiceovers. At times, the movie appears to be a dream-like incoherent, burgeoning medley of side-characters who come only to soon leave the two alone. Yet Ghosh successfully indicates the presence of a deep emotion-scape of these characters that affectively hue Sayani and Asimabho’s withdrawn depiction as common feelings of love, distrust, and loneliness get condensed. Elements like these come together to create a distinctive cinematic language and make Robibaar an oneiric saga where the estranged lovers remain in a trance, as much as love remains a delirium. The movie emerges as an interplay of meaning and unmeaning that Ghosh’s re-examination of love seems to stimulate.

While no closing verdict is dispensed in this trial of love, the film reminds that on our keyboards, the print screen and delete buttons nestle all too uncomfortably close to each other and if we listen closely, we too might hear distant echoes of our own denials.

Robibaar is currently streaming on Hoichoi.