Abhinandan Banerjee’s directorial debut ‘Manikbabur Megh’ (The Cloud and The Man) is a difficult film to write about. It does not fall within any of the conventional genres of cinema. At the intersection of magic realism and urban fantasy, it is a film — ultimately — about a man, a cloud, and a city. The man is Manik, the eponymous Manikbabu; the cloud is a cloud; and the city is Kolkata, or at least some version of it.
The film begins with a montage of Manik’s dull, uneventful life. Manik (masterfully portrayed by Chandan Sen) is the sort of unremarkable middle-aged everyman you might come across in Kolkata. His mundane existence revolves around watering the plants on his rooftop, observing a lizard and a spider at home, walking past the closed-shut louvred windows of his neighbourhood and taking the tram every morning to his office, tutoring a child in the art of poetry recitation in the evening, feeding stray dogs, and preparing meals for himself and his bed-ridden ailing father Madhav (played by veteran character actor Nimai Ghosh).
In the near-silent first half of the film, Banerjee shows us the tedium and ennui of Manik’s unchanging daily life both as a clerk and a caregiver to his father, occasionally breaking the monotony of Manik’s routine with scenes of remarkable tenderness like when, one morning after waking up, he leans into a flower in his window, presses his nose against it, and breathes in. Manik — a part-time poetry recitation tutor — is a romantic at heart, and this one scene becomes the viewers’ first glimpse into the heart of his character. A master of his craft, Sen plays the understated character of Manik with great emotional restraint — communicating his inner world primarily through visual cues and subtle gestures.
Soon, however, Manik’s routine breaks. One morning, he wakes up to an eerily silent apartment, and enters his father’s room only to find out that his father — who turns on the cassette player as soon as he wakes up every morning — has passed away during the night. In the cassette player, the last cassette has run out of tape.
His father’s death is the inciting event that propels the second part of the film. In performing the funerary rites for his father and letting go of him, Manik also lets go of the life he had resigned himself to. His search for a new apartment after his landlord tells him he’ll have to vacate within a month becomes, at the same time, his search for a new life.
In a pivotal moment of the film, as he sits on the banks of the Ganges after performing the funerary rites for his father, something strange happens. Magic slips into the monotonous reality of Manik’s life, beautifully shot in low-key black and white by cinematographer Anup Singh. A cloud begins to follow Manik everywhere, providing him shelter from the sweltering hot summer sun. When he tells his friend Kali (played by Debesh Roy Chowdhury) about this strange phenomenon, Kali wonders if Manik has cataracts in his eyes and takes him to an ophthalmologist (an exuberant Bratya Basu) who concludes there is nothing physically wrong with Manik’s eyesight. Is the bereaved Manik losing his mind? Is this how he’s coping with the grief of his father’s death? Or are these early signs of dementia like his deceased father? Banerjee does not give us any easy answers.
What he offers viewers, instead, is a surreal story about a man, a cloud, and a city — all equally lonely and out of place within and without themselves. The complex, intimate relationships that unfold between these characters show us how intertwined our lives are. I say characters here because Kolkata itself is very much a character in Banerjee’s film — the way the city breathes, moves, and makes itself a part of Manik’s life when he sits alone in a tram, lays on the grass watching the clouds, goes to the fish market, or has lunch at the street-side shacks in office para, Kolkata’s office borough in the Dalhousie area (now B.B.D. Bagh). The details Banerjee and Singh weave into Manik’s quotidian existence brings the city alive on screen and makes it an essential part of the cast. In many ways, Manik is the mirror image of this city — his city — nostalgic, romantic, and anachronistic; a city always in doubt, always in debate, always grappling the tension between the old and the new, bursting from every end of its burgeoning seams, a city at odds with itself.
The heart of this quiet, contemplative film beats the loudest in the silent, speech-less moments when Manik’s relationship with the cloud unfolds. His playfulness while trying to penetrate the cloud with a kite, and the consummation of their love through the act of pouring of water from the cloud, collected in a bucket, onto his body are some of the most sensual yet subtle expressions of love captured on film amidst a sea of overt, increasingly more salacious "love" scenes in commercial Indian films in recent memory.
As a Kolkatan and an admirer of arthouse films, my first reaction to Bengali “art” films is that of dubious hope at best. There have been so many Bengali films over the years that mimic the black and white European art film aesthetic with little substance to offer, to warrant the attention and admiration they expect and demand of their audience. A certain biopic, similarly shot in black and white, comes to mind. But at a slow but graceful, nimble, and quietly indulgent 97 minutes, ‘Manikbabur Megh’ is the sort of film that makes one hope for more — more films like this, please.
'Manikbabur Megh' is currently showing in select cinemas in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Noida, and Gurgaon.
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