Old Gold: The aura of Sharmila Tagore's Mrs Sen in Puratawn

New Indian Express

29-04-2025

Prim and proper Mrs Sen has two house guests. Her beloved daughter Mamoni and her son-in-law have come to celebrate her 80th birthday, but what tumbles out are family secrets – an unravelling marriage and a troubled mother-daughter relationship marked by physical distance and old age. Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore's virtuoso performance as Mrs Sen in
Puratawn
(The Ancient), directed by Sumon Ghosh, had its first private screening in Delhi NCR before a select gathering in the intimate space of Gurugram's Museo Camera Centre for the Photographic Arts on Sunday.
Tagore looked elegant in a black outfit and stole. Rituparna Sengupta, the film's producer, who also plays Tagore's daughter Mamoni, was resplendent in a white sari. Tagore's cousins, cinema critic Shohini Ghosh, former chief information commissioner of India Wajahat Habibullah, and Diana Mickeviciene, the Lithuanian Ambassador to India, were in the audience.
Preparing for the role
After the last bars of Alokananda Dasgupta's music faded from the screen, the discussion moderated by Shantanu Ray Choudhuri, Editor In Chief, Om Books International, began. The two actors talked of the art they brought to play in their respective characters. The script was central for Tagore.
As her character was one for whom memory loss, or rather a state in which 'the past was the present', was continual, she was sent a lot of books on mental health and dementia by the director. 'The character is not based on any real-life Mrs Sen. I kept reading the script and my mind drew on what I had read on the subject, or seen in real life. One film can be about many films. It's difficult to outline the process,' she said. 'The actual transformation of 'becoming' Mrs Sen would happen when I would put on the makeup and go to the set.'
Sengupta's character, too, had quite a graph in the film, moving from concerned daughter to one losing her equilibrium with too many modern-day pulls and pressures – a crumbling marriage with a photographer with his own secrets, a hectic work-life as partner in a consultancy firm, a daughter seeking solace in the old relationship with her mother and then having to confront the fact that her mother's relationship at present is only with the child she was in the past. Sengupta, while talking of 'the great journey as an actor' that
Puratawn
has been, spoke of being in awe of Tagore, and deciding to take up the challenge of being a producer because the senior actor asked her to.
'The director told me I would be challenged on many fronts in this film. What made me do it was the name Sharmila Tagore. She said, 'I am doing a film in my language after so many years….' It was such a personal confession….'
The Puratawn milestone
Puratawn
is a milestone in Sharmila Tagore's career. Her luminous beauty and acting have graced Indian cinema right from her first appearance as Aparna, a young bride with eyes like bottomless pools, in Satyajit Ray's
Apur Sansar
(1959), part of the Apu Trilogy.
Puratawn
is her return to Bengali cinema after 14 years; she was last seen in Rituparno Ghosh's
Shubho Muhurat,
a mystery thriller in which she played a former leading actor who turns to murder for a reason. This year is also the 50th year of her finest Hindi film performance in
Mausam
(1975); she played Kajli, a foul-mouthed sex worker, trying to seduce a man who knows she is his daughter and has come to claim her.
Amitabh Bachchan is Tagore's contemporary; the two have been paired in films such as
Besharam
and
Faraar.
Like Bachchan, who still has films written for him, keeping in mind his age, Tagore – and perhaps Shabana Azmi – is the only woman actor around whom films are mounted. In 2023, Tagore played Kusum Batra, the matriarch in
Gulmohur
, a family drama set in a well-to-do middle-class north Indian home, coincidentally also a film where the drama unfolds around the leaving and keeping of an old house.
In
Puratawn
, the house was crucial to the story. Set on the banks of Ganga, in an area that was once the hub of Bengal's jute mills, it is atmospheric and sits in an area that has its own story of rise, decline and death. Tagore and Sengupta joked about the director 'getting this house' almost a condition for doing the film as he had signed up the actors he wanted. 'Are we not enough? Is the house so important?' shared the actors to much laughter.
The making
Tagore's world in
Puratawn
is, by design, dimly lit. Her character is built up with silences, vacant eyes, a sudden dimpling of her face, absent-mindedness, shifts of mood and temper, depending on which moment of the past she inhabits in her present moment. Beautiful Bengal handlooms, everyday at-home saris that women of a certain generation wear, and a black and gold dhakai in a pivotal scene in which she agrees to a black bindi be placed on her forehead, accentuated the actor's beauty; the scenes in which there are close-ups of the character's veins, much like the gnarled roots of trees that have entered her house, show the imprint of time on one of mainstream cinema's most remarkable actors, and her long journey.
Tagore is generous in her praise of the director and the production team of a film that, many say, may get her a National Award. 'The pauses, the silences, the ambience, were all there in the story, and was made possible by the direction. Everything was made possible so that I could be effective,' she said. 'In theatre, you can own the space and have a conversation with the audience. But in a film if you are not in the right frame or the lens is wrong…the film's DOP [Director of Photography] Ravi Kiran Ayyagari is a wizard,' she said.
The audience reactions were that of fulsome praise. 'I thought I had forgotten to cry,' said a member of the audience. Others spoke of the film's 'relatability' in post-Covid-19 times, of many generations having to live together and its challenges. The Lithuanian ambassador said it was 'a universal story and can be imagined on any continent'.
The Bengalis in the audience couldn't have enough of the references to bottles of Arnica, Boroline, HIT spray and KC Nag maths book, staples in their homes— one was witness to this a week before as well when one caught the film at a Gurugram big screen. Perhaps, in those moments something in them stirred, the city vanished and they were transported back home in Bengal re-opening some boxes covered in ancient dust.
Puratawn enters the third week nationally. It has been selected for the New York Indian Film Festival. To watch Puratawn, book tickets at