Anant Mahapatra’s new film Bhabantar (The Heart’s Desires) is an emotionally deep and cinematically accomplished story that explores the power of human passion to create and destroy. Focussing entirely on the interplay between three characters, it charts, without either the moralism or the sensationalism to which so much Indian cinematic narrative about human relationships is prone, the extremes of volcanic sexual desire and boundless self-sacrifice that can both, in certain contexts, be the forms and faces of love.
And in so doing, it leaves us with much to ruminate upon – in particular about the meaning of marriage. Can fidelity and infidelity coexist? Is the character of a marriage influenced by one or two large and unforgettable events, or hundreds of small ones? Is surrendering one’s own desires in the face of another’s an example of heroic self-sacrifice and idealism, or passivity and abjectness? Must sexual passion necessarily be disciplined by social codes and prohibitions, and even if we believe that it should, does that not make the breaking of such taboos a kind of heroism? Are men and women human beings first and foremost, and therefore to be judged by the same criteria? Or do masculinity and femininity exert different kinds of pressure and power on those who dwell on their planets? Do all of us have invisible or imaginary partners in our romantic lives alongside our flesh-and-blood ones? Are some people givers by nature and some takers, and what happens to the idea of equality when such people come together in marriage? These are the striking questions raised by the film, which shows its maker to be someone who has not only thought deeply about human relationships but also found a very resonant artistic language to express them.
Like many of the earliest Indian novels, Bhabantar – based on a story, “Pabitra Papa”, by the writer Ajay Mohapatra – is dominated by the sentiments and struggles of a female protagonist: the young and beautiful new bride Srabani (Suryamayee Mohapatra). In the film’s opening scene, Srabani appears veiled by the pallu of her sari, being led into her bridal chamber by a female family member. Inside the bedroom, the bed is strewn with rose petals, and a single diya flickers by the bedside.
But as soon as Srabani is left alone, she flings the pallu off her head – Mahapatra cuts to the flame guttering and nearly blowing out – before grudgingly putting it on again. A passionate tumult already visible in her nature has risen to the surface, observed only by the camera. When her husband Sritam (Abhisek Giri) arrives, he reaches out to raise his young bride’s face towards his own. It is only now that we hear the first words of dialogue in the film.
“Don’t touch me!”
It is a very impressive opening scene, and it sets up the conflict that smoulders through the rest of the story. What passes between the couple on their wedding night is not something physical but a wrenching story that, even as it immediately drives a wedge between them, will require them to work together if the entire world that rests upon their union is not to be destroyed.
Srabani reveals to Sritam that shortly before their marriage was decided by their respective parents, she had met an attractive man, Milan (Saroj Nanda), at a party while visiting her older sister in Kolkata. We cut to the past. Sparks fly between the couple as having left the rest of the company behind, they stand together gazing at the moon in the night sky, speaking to one another in riddles.
Mahapatra’s artistic depiction of their affair, in a sequence that lasts no more than a couple of minutes, is one of the highlights of the film. The sense of ecstatic connection he manages to summon between man and woman is key to persuading us of the integrity, such as it is, of Srabani’s stance not just on her wedding night but for the rest of her days.
Although they have spent only one night together and she knows virtually nothing about him, Srabani feels she cannot love anyone hereafter but Milan. “Nari ra mana au hrudaya…purusa pari nuhen. Mu chanhiley bhi kebey au kahaku bhala pai paribini,” she says, to her husband’s poignant, half-hopeful question about whether she could perhaps bring herself to forget Milan. Her feeling for Milan is now and hereon her truth; her marriage, therefore, is merely a role that she has agreed to play.
But what is the unfortunate Sritam to make of such a truth? He could reveal Srabani’s affair to the world and exit a meaningless marriage. But that would be too much to bear for his ailing parents, and expose Srabani to the wrath of society. Gallantly, he suggests that they continue to play the part of husband and wife until a propitious time can be found for them to separate. In fact, he himself undertakes to search out Milan – about whom nothing is known but his name – so that Srabani, at least, may have her heart’s desire.
Thus Mahapatra sets up with this opening scene, the crisscrossing paths and emotional tumults of his three protagonists. We see Srabani learning how to play the role of a wife in a marriage that will dissolve the day that her husband tracks down her lover; Sritam searching for his own successor and watching his wife’s face fall every time he comes home with no news; and Milan, now seen having given up his life in Kolkata and vainly roaming the streets of Bhubaneswar in search of Srabani.
Alongside these quests of the heart, there is the reality of two people living together in some kind of mutual accommodation, even affection, under one roof. Both husband and wife are hostages to time, then, waiting for a future that will release them from the burdens of the present. The complexity of the couple’s predicament is further exacerbated when Srabani discovers she is pregnant. (“You must hate me,” she says to her husband – but he does not. In a strange way, his quiet love is just as provocative as his wife’s passion.)
The conversations between Srabani and Sritam are very pointed and punctuated by pauses more interesting than any words could be. (It is not very difficult to make a superficially “dramatic” cinema of speech; much harder to make a dramatic cinema of silence.) But visually, Mahapatra reserves most of his close-ups – and therefore the emotional core of the story – for Srabani, whose turbulent inner world is majestically rendered by director and actress in some memorable long takes.
In one scene, in which Srabani is seen first removing a picture of herself and Sritam from the dressing table and putting it away in a cupboard – it is a truth that she cannot quite face up to – and then replacing it with a photograph of her doting in-laws – making them happy is something that genuinely does give her fulfillment and is a way of expressing her gratitude to Sritam – expresses all her conflicts only by tracking her face in a mirror.
Although years go by, Srabani never quite gives up the memory of Milan. Finally, there comes a day when she and Milan do chance on one another again. But can she, in the light of her new experience of life, find the will to follow through on her heart’s desire and leave her marital home? Or must Srabani and Milan also make a sacrifice that mirrors Sritam’s?
There is very little clarity here, but what is clear is that each of the characters discovers depths they did not know they possessed. Although society tries to box us into convention and conformity, Mahapatra seems to be telling us, that life is really about trying to find an honest response to the unique challenges and dilemmas visited on us by fate or indeed by our own passions. Love and desire have an enormous creative and transcendent power, a point made by the lovely title song written by Devdas Chhotray and are a source of self-knowledge and growth. If we are to know what it means to have lived, we must embrace and risk being singed by their fire.
This is the core of the message voiced by Sritam at the end of the film, as, after one final unexpected twist in the tale, he sits with Srabani mulling over the meaning of their lives, long years after they first came together under one roof. “Sabu pabitra,” he muses. Everything they have done and felt is sacred. It reveals Mahapatra, too, to be a very wise, compassionate humanist – a creator with a heart as big as his characters and the ability to get a large cast of actors and technicians to commit to his unusual aesthetic vision. The work of an artist whose flame still burns brightly in the ninth decade of his life, Bhabantar deserves a very wide viewership.
( The writer is a novelist and literary critic based in Bhubaneswar. His books include Clouds (2018) and My Country Is Literature (2021).
