Puratawn

Memory loss or issues with memory is an unusual problem. More than the person suffering from the same, it affects those around him or her. This is the base of writer and director Suman Ghosh’s Bengali film Puratawn (English title: The Ancient). The movie revolves around Ritika (Ritupatna Sengupta), a woman working in the corporate sector in a high position. Her marriage with Rajeev (Indraneil Sengupta), a passionate photographer, is going through turbulence. She, along with Rajeev, visits her ancestral home in a small town in West Bengal where her mother Mrs Sen (Sharmila Tagore) lives, to celebrate the latter’s 80th birthday in a grand manner. But there is also another reason for Ritika’s visit. She and Rajeev wish to reveal to her that their marriage is going nowhere. However, after arriving at the ancestral house, Ritika is pained to know that her mother is facing memory issues. Now, she is more hesitant to tell her about her troubled marriage as she doesn’t know how she would take it.

Writer-director Suman Ghosh situates Puratawn (The Ancient) in a sprawling ancestral abode inhabited by a widowed matriarch and her housemaid. Many stories, some fading, others perennial, and many of them going all the way back to the 1970s and beyond, resides in this mansion and in the mind of its principal occupant. The physical location as well as the wizened lady’s psyche are sites where mere words and gestures do not convey as much immediate meaning as forgotten objects and indelible remembrances do. It is human to hold on to secrets, to create mysteries, and to conjure up conundrums in the course of the humdrum of existence — the protagonist of Puratawn does all that as she looks for ways to resist obliteration of what she holds dear.