Parama: A Journey With Aparna Sen

Aparna Sen, movie star, ace filmmaker, successful magazine editor and active civil society leader, has had an incredibly eventful and diverse career. A documentary chronicling her life and times was long overdue. But that certainly isn’t the only reason why Suman Ghosh’s Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen, should be essential viewing. Straddling a wide gamut - from the personal and professional to the political and public - and employing a wide range of interviews and reminiscences of notable contemporaries, Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen throws light on an accomplished filmmaker, her significant body of work and the complexities of the times that she lives and works in. Suman Ghosh, who cast Aparna Sen alongside Soumitra Chatterjee in Basu Poribar (2018), has produced a deft 81-minute cinematic document that encapsulates the varied facets of one of India’s foremost filmmakers. The female gaze and the primacy of films that put women at their centre are inevitably mentioned, but Ghosh, taking a cue from the subject’s stand on the matter, does not unduly foreground Sen’s gender.

Parama : A Journey With Aparna Sen is a lively portrait of an artiste, with conversations that the director conducts with his subject, and her subjects. It begins, aptly, with a sequence from Sen’s first directorial, ‘36, Chowringhee Lane’, a 1981 film that brings alive a slice of Calcutta long since vanished. Violet Stoneham, played unforgettably by Jennifer Kendal, is an Anglo-Indian-school teacher-spinster who lives alone. An accidental meeting with a former student and her boyfriend injects warmth and colour into her drab life, but the change is sadly short-lived. Ghosh and his team take Sen to the building — the kind in which the lifts didn’t work, the bare tangle of electricity wires hanging dangerously low over the staircase — in which the film was shot, and we hear her reminisce about how one of her best films, and one whose portrayal of loneliness still aches, came together.