Still from Anjan Dutta’s Ranjana Ami ar Ashbona, 2011.

Anjan Dutt’s new rock musical is low on cultural memory and high on imagined nostalgia, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury

Can five ageing rockers, none of them stars but charismatic individuals, drifters and iconoclasts and dedicated to music in their real and reel life, make for successful Bengali cinema? Is the rock music scene in Calcutta that important to sustain a prolonged narrative about its many trails? Is the making of a female rock star even a passing concern or cultural necessity? Before going into the film it should be noted that Dutt’s new film does one serious service to good cinema. In the climate of a severely self-aggrandising industrial requirement of Tollywood, where pleasing and pandering to the mass and especially a younger constituency has become a ritual, the film resolutely talks about a dying man who in the last days of his otherwise disorderly life, makes one last effort to remain relevant while respecting the legacy that he had borne for long. But the film is also a sad reminder of what could have been, both in terms of a cinematic specimen as well as one that takes a serious bow to music.

Anjan Dutt’s rock musical Ranjana Ami Ar Ashbona tries to close in on a staple interest area of Dutt, who through much of his later life as a filmmaker (Bong Connection, Madly Bangalee) has tried to explore dissemination, penetration and the heartbreak associated with the promulgation of rock music in India, particularly, Calcutta. His interest is far from that of an academic or even serious filmmaker, which is both good and bad.

Bad, because despite the promise and clever insights, his films, for lack of intellectual rigour and referential framework, often seems to wear off at the margins, leaving merely torn traces of a cloth that could well have been stitched into an attractive piece of clothing. Good, because unlike the closed eco-system of academic exchange or self-indulgent arthouse cinema, his concerns reach a far wider number, even if that number is never enough to rival that of men in quicksilver clothing in commercial cinema, who upset speeding cars and stun the sun with effortless ease.

In other words, Dutt’s in-betweenness is both his best virtue and his biggest weakness. This median existence is evident in his trying to bankroll the film on the singular appeal of his musician co-stars. While this is commendable in an industry that peddles brawn over every other gift, as far as the film is concerned, it fails to make the best use of this space of cultural memory. Amyt Dutt, Nondon Bagchi and Lew Hilt, the three of the gang of four (the fourth being the fictional vocalist and hedonist Abani Sen) who play music together in the film, are all superbly talented musicians in real life. Also, they are real characters in any story about Calcutta’s history of music and performance. In a film of this nature, characters are inevitably expected to bring into the screen a kind of pre-factum memory, a memory that Dutt, clearly, wants to bank on. In other words, each musician in the film, including the protagonist Abani Sen but except the eponymous Ranjana (Parno Mitra), is carrying the character from beyond the film into itself. They are not in the film as part of a complex quartet of musicians who debate music and life with Sen, but because they bring in their real-life persona into it. This could have been an asset but becomes a problem because music, unfortunately, is not the high point in the film. And the roles are wasted because what all the three musicians eventually end up doing is playing the fiddle to Sen and Ranjana.

Had the three, and Abani — a kind of a self-destructive alter ego of Anjan Dutt — discussed life and universe in a lively pairing of music and narrative, the film could have well been a kind of expansive nostalgia drive through the lanes of Calcutta’s rock music. All four of them have been a part of Calcutta’s music scene in real life, since when the tables in Trinca’s sang to the tune of Pam Crain and are still part of it when bars swing to live music every new day. That would have made the film a tract worth preserving, a kind of a Still Crazy for our generation, because the appeal of rock in Calcutta may not be close to that of the cities of the West, but it does have a small, dedicated following which always aspired to its glory — from the heydays of Park Street to the live music scene in present-day Calcutta. This could also have meant that the film would locate the true belonging of rock music, marginal to Calcutta’s self-fashioning but central to its cosmopolitan aspirations.

But all that would require the aforesaid intellectual rigour, which is unfortunately not one of Dutt’s strong points. Instead, Dutt wastes the script and himself as Abani Sen in trying to locate a legacy in Ranjana, whose potential, he thinks would find the best expression under his tutelage. Interestingly, and this is the only part where the film breaks with convention and cultural expectation since this tutelage is not devoid of an initial burst of pure lust, which is later subsumed into a larger paradigm of the teacher-pupil relationship.

Even if here the associations are initially bold and perhaps more real, given the bohemianism of Sen and the desperation of Ranjana, it quickly gives in to the expected bhadrolok sensibility of asexual assimilation of the ageing and disorderly man walking into the sunset and desperate to pass on the baton to a worthy heir. Here also Anjan Dutt finally gives in to what is expected of him and not of Abani Sen, the character he plays to perfection and who in the reel version is frantically trying to deny the presence of Anjan Dutt, the person in real life.

Abani Sen is what Anjan Dutt may have aspired to be or maybe not. But the problem is that by being poised somewhat at the same level of age and musical sensibility, Anjan Dutt, though flawless in performance, can’t help but walk in and out of Abani Sen, thereby denying the character fictional immortality as a dying rocker who with wanton disquiet, subverts bhadrolok definitions of civility, while at the same time aspires to die as a talismanic figurehead of rock.

Abani Sen’s pain of failing health, music and gradual distancing from things he loves are palpable but his evolution as a benign tutor and begging to the various regimes of the establishment to make a success out of Ranjana is wish fulfilment of the bhadrolok. Here is a young woman from far suburbs who comes to him, refuses to surrender to his lustful advances, befriends his friends, unlocks a closed room in his mansion where Sen hides his past, learns music from him and steals away all the light from Sen’s life while the old man breaths his last at a hospital attended only by a journalist friend and half-lover.

This is a benign story, something that bears little testimony to the trails of doing original music in Calcutta, a journey fraught with longing and heartbreak. Also, this is bad writing, because given Sen’s pathological self-indulgence and uber-male ego, wouldn’t it be more obvious if Sen had shot himself, instead of fainting at the news of his mentor leaving town forever? His mentor, Stanley Bose (Kabir Suman in a perfectly rendered cameo) leaves the city to be with the marginalised, away from the wasteful excesses of the city. While leaving, Bose leaves his guitar not for Sen, but for Ranjana, an act that is the final rejection for Sen.

This film could have gone down as animated, seminal, bold and unconventional film that makes capital out of cultural memory and delightfully uses the undying neons of nostalgia. Instead, Dutt rages with a camera and a pen, grappling with a subject whose imminence he is himself unsure about. 

Abani Sen lives as the last of raging 60s men in Bengali cinema but sadly dies like another bhadrolok from any other century.