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Uttara (film)
Encyclopedia
Uttara is a 2000 Bengali language
drama film
thriller directed by Bengali poet Buddhadev Dasgupta. The film, based on a short story by Samaresh Bose stars Jaya Seal as Uttara, Tapas Pal
and Shankar Chakraborty and Raisul Islam Asad
as a Christian missionary.
The film contrasts violence
, human vices and lawlessness in a seemingly peaceful setting, in a quiet village in Purulia
district in Bengal
.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival
on 30 August 2000 and was the Winner of the festivals' Special Director award.
The film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on September 2000 and on 22 May it was shown in the US at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
The film was released in France
on 13 June 2001 and won the Audience Award at the Nantes festival. The film also opened the Pusan Film Festival in South Korea
.
The film due to its homoerotic undetones was shown at a number of gay and lesbian film festivals including the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
.
, in Purulia
district, single railroad workers and best friends Balaram (Shankar Chakraborty) and Nemai (Tapas Pal) spend their days wrestling
on a hill with little work to speak of because the fact that their flag station has only a couple of trains to be flagged off or signalled to.
Wrestling, however, despite its aggression and physical combat, turns into an expression of close bonding for Nimai and Balaram, a bond already established through their complementary work at the flag station. Wrestling, for them, is a way of releasing physical energy and a form of dynamic entertainment.
Amidst wrestling, they spend their time talking with the locals, who include Padri Baba, a local Christian
pastor
who lives in the village church and looks after his seven-year-old orphaned nephew, Matthew. He takes him along on his bicycle
when he serves the lepers, the poor and the oppressed in the village.
There is a colony of dwarf
s that inhabit this peculiar and mystic village. Each morning, they can be seen crossing the hillocks and pass through the forests to catch the daily public bus
and go to their respective jobs. Among them is a grinning railway guard who is always in uniform with exaggerated mannerisms, alertness and paranoia.
There are also a troupe of masked dancers who pass across the village, mutely going about their rhythmic routine. There is a world below this in the village, consisting of a bunch of bumbling poor old men, Indian Christians, who dream of travelling to America
by first reaching Kolkata
with a complete lack of geographical knowledge.
At this point a couple of city yobs in fashionable clothing move around in the village in their jeep, downing bottles of beer
to get rid of their boredom as they go stalking, what or who, is unfolded towards the end of the film.
Balaram returns from visiting his aged aunt with wife Uttara (Jaya Seal), and her presence slowly but surely begins to tear their intense friendship building up to a disastrous, catastrophic climax. The people and their separate worlds are not really linked to one another. They appear like a collage of images that do not quite add up to make a meaningful whole. Yet, they describe, in their own way, the vulnerability of human life to greed, to lust, to violence, and ultimately death. The violent actions of the three Hindu
extremists threaten the peace of the village, but a sliver of hope remains.
Uttara soon painstakingly learns the bitter truth that to both her husband Balaram and his friend Nimai, as well as to the city-bred goons, she is no more than a piece of flesh to be devoured, rape
d, violated and killed. Nimai, with a broken marriage before him, a marriage that exists only in remote memory, feels particularly jealous of Balaram because he has Uttara. Balaram is happy with this beautiful 'thing' he alone 'possesses' and therefore, can 'devour' at will, within the privacy of their bedroom, or, under the open sky against the backdrop of the fields.
With the two men's silent squabbles over Uttara, the apparent serenity of the village is disturbed, with an onslaught of violence, murder, blood and gore. The roaring sound of the speeding jeep
metamorphoses into an eruption of barbaric violence.
The two fundamentalist city yobs torch the Christian missionary Padre tying him to a pole and burning him and the whole church is set ablaze. A panic stricken Uttara cries out to Nemai and Balaram for help whilst the boy Matthew escapes unharmed. But their senses are blind and deaf and mute to the outer world and they go on wrestling.
Then as the dwarf railway guard offers Uttara hope for a better future, the goons kill him. They then chase a fleeing Uttara, rape and kill her. The scene of peaceful harmony is reduced to one of meaningless and futile violence. The camera pans to capture a glimpse of Uttara's violated corpse, the deadbody of the kindly railway guard, the fire in the church in the remote distance.
Amidst all the scenes of death and destruction, the film ends on a moving scene of living violence. A golden sky throws the two silhouetted wrestling figures of Nimai and Balaram in relief. The circle of moral decay, of an environment that easily lets the animalistic instinct within the man out, is complete. The group of masked dancers silently wrap a fleeing Mathew into their fold as he becomes one of them, offering only a tiny glimmer of hope in a world of despair.
s, and rivers, suggesting the search for an alternative world. As the dwarf who tries to help Uttara explains, these people have grown weary of the world of 'tall people', which full of cruelty and despair, and seek an alternate world. This is a metaphor for the wider world plagued by inequality and corruption. The troupe of masked folk dancers, who meander through the various parts of the village, function within a mythic framework, representing the continuity of culture and tradition, and act as a stabilizing force in the various conflicts that mar the idyllic world of the village.
The schism between the friends is illustrated in the wrestling, which gradually becomes an overpowering obsession. Instead of expressing bonding, it takes on the colour of a power-game between two equally physically strong and morally weak men. The wrestling irrespective of homo- erotic undertones is a deliberate destruction where one aims to destroy the other, as each morally unjust man attempt to win the physical 'possession' of Uttara.
Although an allegorical, cautionary tale on religious fundamentalism, between Christianity and Hinduism, Uttara is also an incisive examination of the provincialism, anachronism, moral
and social injustice, and inherent contradiction. Contradiction is very important element in the film, for example the Christian
missionary Padre who dispenses of his food wastefully at a rural village ravaged by poverty in exchange for converting desperate (and undernourished) souls, and a band of Hindu zealots aggressively roaming the landscape in their off-road utility vehicle and behaving in a manner completely with disregard to others contrary to the Hindu faith.
Another important aspect of the film is the way in which the dwarfs don pagan masks and ritualistically perform an ancient parade through the village. The seemingly pantheistic ancient dance, is intended to represent an instinctual connection to roots and tradition becoming a metaphor for the sense of duty that has become increasingly sublimated in an environment of self-interest, vanity, gluttony and strong jealousy and competition. It is this contrasted, parallel image of reverence for the cycle of nature that renders Buddhadeb Dasgupta's vision of Indian society as a complex and tragic one, illustrating that society is overcome by hypocrisy
. The barbaric behaviour of the city-dwellers is also intended to reflect the deviance of human nature in modern urban society, as it becomes plagued by declining moral values and terrorized by the inhumanity of extremism.
and before sunset to emphasise the natural lighting on the landscape and to create atmosphere. In addition this is precisely matched with reverse angle shots and unusually deep focus for framing and blocking. The cumulative result of a such a technique also adds to the formal unease, in a world where distinct natural beauty and deadly human menace coexist in equal measure. The cinematography
, with the increasing or diminishing light of day is intended to directly coincide with the volatile changes in the ambience and mood of the film. The intense sunrise in one of the scenes as tension surmounts attempts to exude a feeling of heat, giving reflecting the burning emotions between the two wrestlers who are overcome by lust and jealousy.
The various sounds that accompany these images also play into this reiteration of theme on a more abstract level, ranging from the eerie silence that accompanies the menacing presence of the three goons, to the death knell that sounds as a rock rolls down while the two wrestlers fight to kill each other. The audio
occasionally uses a lot of rhythm and beats, for instance during the escapades of the three yobs, but on the contrary this is sometimes juxtaposed by images and sounds of tranquility, the shots of the orchard
accompanied by a soothing tune, and the troupe of dancers with their folk culture, that signify hope for the future.
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
drama film
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
thriller directed by Bengali poet Buddhadev Dasgupta. The film, based on a short story by Samaresh Bose stars Jaya Seal as Uttara, Tapas Pal
Tapas Pal
Tapas Pal born in 1960 in a remote village in Jalpaiguri district is a Bengali actor from Calcutta, the son of Dr. Ganash Pal of Chandannagar. He is a Member of Parliament having won in the 2009 Indian General Eelections on a Trinamool Congress ticket from Krishnanagar . His mother hails from a...
and Shankar Chakraborty and Raisul Islam Asad
Raisul Islam Asad
Raisul Islam Asad ; born: Asaduzzaman Mohammad Raisul Islam in July 15, 1952 Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a Bangladeshi actor and has won several national awards for performing in all four medias of Radio, Theatre, Television and Film. He won the National award as best actor for the film Padma Nadeer...
as a Christian missionary.
The film contrasts violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
, human vices and lawlessness in a seemingly peaceful setting, in a quiet village in Purulia
Purulia
Purulia , also spelled Puruliya, also known as "Manbhum City", is a city located in West Bengal state, India, and was constituted in 1876. It is the location of the district headquarters of Purulia district. Purulia is located on the north of the Kasai river and is a major road and railway...
district in Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
on 30 August 2000 and was the Winner of the festivals' Special Director award.
The film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on September 2000 and on 22 May it was shown in the US at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival – formerly known as VC FilmFest – is an annual film festival presented by Visual Communications . It was established in 1983 as a vehicle to promote Asian Pacific American and Asian international cinema. The festival fulfills a unique mission in...
The film was released in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
on 13 June 2001 and won the Audience Award at the Nantes festival. The film also opened the Pusan Film Festival in South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
.
The film due to its homoerotic undetones was shown at a number of gay and lesbian film festivals including the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival takes place every spring in London, England. It began as a season of gay and lesbian films at the National Film Theatre in 1986 and 1987 under the title "Gay's Own Pictures", curated by Peter Packer of the Tyneside Cinema, and was renamed the London...
.
Plot
In the pastoral expanse of rural BengalBengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
, in Purulia
Purulia
Purulia , also spelled Puruliya, also known as "Manbhum City", is a city located in West Bengal state, India, and was constituted in 1876. It is the location of the district headquarters of Purulia district. Purulia is located on the north of the Kasai river and is a major road and railway...
district, single railroad workers and best friends Balaram (Shankar Chakraborty) and Nemai (Tapas Pal) spend their days wrestling
Wrestling
Wrestling is a form of grappling type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling holds. A wrestling bout is a physical competition, between two competitors or sparring partners, who attempt to gain and maintain a superior position...
on a hill with little work to speak of because the fact that their flag station has only a couple of trains to be flagged off or signalled to.
Wrestling, however, despite its aggression and physical combat, turns into an expression of close bonding for Nimai and Balaram, a bond already established through their complementary work at the flag station. Wrestling, for them, is a way of releasing physical energy and a form of dynamic entertainment.
Amidst wrestling, they spend their time talking with the locals, who include Padri Baba, a local Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
pastor
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....
who lives in the village church and looks after his seven-year-old orphaned nephew, Matthew. He takes him along on his bicycle
Bicycle
A bicycle, also known as a bike, pushbike or cycle, is a human-powered, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A person who rides a bicycle is called a cyclist, or bicyclist....
when he serves the lepers, the poor and the oppressed in the village.
There is a colony of dwarf
Dwarfism
Dwarfism is short stature resulting from a medical condition. It is sometimes defined as an adult height of less than 4 feet 10 inches , although this definition is problematic because short stature in itself is not a disorder....
s that inhabit this peculiar and mystic village. Each morning, they can be seen crossing the hillocks and pass through the forests to catch the daily public bus
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
and go to their respective jobs. Among them is a grinning railway guard who is always in uniform with exaggerated mannerisms, alertness and paranoia.
There are also a troupe of masked dancers who pass across the village, mutely going about their rhythmic routine. There is a world below this in the village, consisting of a bunch of bumbling poor old men, Indian Christians, who dream of travelling to America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
by first reaching Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
with a complete lack of geographical knowledge.
At this point a couple of city yobs in fashionable clothing move around in the village in their jeep, downing bottles of beer
Beer
Beer is the world's most widely consumed andprobably oldest alcoholic beverage; it is the third most popular drink overall, after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of sugars, mainly derived from malted cereal grains, most commonly malted barley and malted wheat...
to get rid of their boredom as they go stalking, what or who, is unfolded towards the end of the film.
Balaram returns from visiting his aged aunt with wife Uttara (Jaya Seal), and her presence slowly but surely begins to tear their intense friendship building up to a disastrous, catastrophic climax. The people and their separate worlds are not really linked to one another. They appear like a collage of images that do not quite add up to make a meaningful whole. Yet, they describe, in their own way, the vulnerability of human life to greed, to lust, to violence, and ultimately death. The violent actions of the three Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
extremists threaten the peace of the village, but a sliver of hope remains.
Uttara soon painstakingly learns the bitter truth that to both her husband Balaram and his friend Nimai, as well as to the city-bred goons, she is no more than a piece of flesh to be devoured, rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
d, violated and killed. Nimai, with a broken marriage before him, a marriage that exists only in remote memory, feels particularly jealous of Balaram because he has Uttara. Balaram is happy with this beautiful 'thing' he alone 'possesses' and therefore, can 'devour' at will, within the privacy of their bedroom, or, under the open sky against the backdrop of the fields.
With the two men's silent squabbles over Uttara, the apparent serenity of the village is disturbed, with an onslaught of violence, murder, blood and gore. The roaring sound of the speeding jeep
Jeep
Jeep is an automobile marque of Chrysler . The first Willys Jeeps were produced in 1941 with the first civilian models in 1945, making it the oldest off-road vehicle and sport utility vehicle brand. It inspired a number of other light utility vehicles, such as the Land Rover which is the second...
metamorphoses into an eruption of barbaric violence.
The two fundamentalist city yobs torch the Christian missionary Padre tying him to a pole and burning him and the whole church is set ablaze. A panic stricken Uttara cries out to Nemai and Balaram for help whilst the boy Matthew escapes unharmed. But their senses are blind and deaf and mute to the outer world and they go on wrestling.
Then as the dwarf railway guard offers Uttara hope for a better future, the goons kill him. They then chase a fleeing Uttara, rape and kill her. The scene of peaceful harmony is reduced to one of meaningless and futile violence. The camera pans to capture a glimpse of Uttara's violated corpse, the deadbody of the kindly railway guard, the fire in the church in the remote distance.
Amidst all the scenes of death and destruction, the film ends on a moving scene of living violence. A golden sky throws the two silhouetted wrestling figures of Nimai and Balaram in relief. The circle of moral decay, of an environment that easily lets the animalistic instinct within the man out, is complete. The group of masked dancers silently wrap a fleeing Mathew into their fold as he becomes one of them, offering only a tiny glimmer of hope in a world of despair.
Overview of the film
The way the movie depicts the development of the plot conveys this violation of a peaceful world. The series of disjunctive shots of the various threads of the story that follow the opening utopian shot disrupt any notions of linearity, making the audience feel the conflict of the various forces that destroys the village. One of these scenes shows an army of dwarfs traversing mountains, plainPlain
In geography, a plain is land with relatively low relief, that is flat or gently rolling. Prairies and steppes are types of plains, and the archetype for a plain is often thought of as a grassland, but plains in their natural state may also be covered in shrublands, woodland and forest, or...
s, and rivers, suggesting the search for an alternative world. As the dwarf who tries to help Uttara explains, these people have grown weary of the world of 'tall people', which full of cruelty and despair, and seek an alternate world. This is a metaphor for the wider world plagued by inequality and corruption. The troupe of masked folk dancers, who meander through the various parts of the village, function within a mythic framework, representing the continuity of culture and tradition, and act as a stabilizing force in the various conflicts that mar the idyllic world of the village.
The schism between the friends is illustrated in the wrestling, which gradually becomes an overpowering obsession. Instead of expressing bonding, it takes on the colour of a power-game between two equally physically strong and morally weak men. The wrestling irrespective of homo- erotic undertones is a deliberate destruction where one aims to destroy the other, as each morally unjust man attempt to win the physical 'possession' of Uttara.
Although an allegorical, cautionary tale on religious fundamentalism, between Christianity and Hinduism, Uttara is also an incisive examination of the provincialism, anachronism, moral
Moral
A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
and social injustice, and inherent contradiction. Contradiction is very important element in the film, for example the Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
missionary Padre who dispenses of his food wastefully at a rural village ravaged by poverty in exchange for converting desperate (and undernourished) souls, and a band of Hindu zealots aggressively roaming the landscape in their off-road utility vehicle and behaving in a manner completely with disregard to others contrary to the Hindu faith.
Another important aspect of the film is the way in which the dwarfs don pagan masks and ritualistically perform an ancient parade through the village. The seemingly pantheistic ancient dance, is intended to represent an instinctual connection to roots and tradition becoming a metaphor for the sense of duty that has become increasingly sublimated in an environment of self-interest, vanity, gluttony and strong jealousy and competition. It is this contrasted, parallel image of reverence for the cycle of nature that renders Buddhadeb Dasgupta's vision of Indian society as a complex and tragic one, illustrating that society is overcome by hypocrisy
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie....
. The barbaric behaviour of the city-dwellers is also intended to reflect the deviance of human nature in modern urban society, as it becomes plagued by declining moral values and terrorized by the inhumanity of extremism.
Cinematography and audio
The film is shot strikingly with visual imagination of the rural pastoral landscapes, the solitary huts of the wrestlers and the isolated church, contrasted against the malignant presence of the three urban yobs and their brutality. Filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta employs a unique strategy of shooting where he consistently shot periods of the film just after dawnDawn
Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of the twilight before sunrise. It is recognized by the presence of weak sunlight, while the sun itself is still below the horizon...
and before sunset to emphasise the natural lighting on the landscape and to create atmosphere. In addition this is precisely matched with reverse angle shots and unusually deep focus for framing and blocking. The cumulative result of a such a technique also adds to the formal unease, in a world where distinct natural beauty and deadly human menace coexist in equal measure. The cinematography
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
, with the increasing or diminishing light of day is intended to directly coincide with the volatile changes in the ambience and mood of the film. The intense sunrise in one of the scenes as tension surmounts attempts to exude a feeling of heat, giving reflecting the burning emotions between the two wrestlers who are overcome by lust and jealousy.
The various sounds that accompany these images also play into this reiteration of theme on a more abstract level, ranging from the eerie silence that accompanies the menacing presence of the three goons, to the death knell that sounds as a rock rolls down while the two wrestlers fight to kill each other. The audio
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
occasionally uses a lot of rhythm and beats, for instance during the escapades of the three yobs, but on the contrary this is sometimes juxtaposed by images and sounds of tranquility, the shots of the orchard
Orchard
An orchard is an intentional planting of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit or nut-producing trees which are grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of large gardens, where they serve an aesthetic as well as a productive...
accompanied by a soothing tune, and the troupe of dancers with their folk culture, that signify hope for the future.
Cast
- Jaya Seal as Uttara
- Tapas PalTapas PalTapas Pal born in 1960 in a remote village in Jalpaiguri district is a Bengali actor from Calcutta, the son of Dr. Ganash Pal of Chandannagar. He is a Member of Parliament having won in the 2009 Indian General Eelections on a Trinamool Congress ticket from Krishnanagar . His mother hails from a...
as Nemai - Shankar Chakraborty as Balaram
- R.I. Ahmed as Padre
- Tapas Adhikari as Railway Guard
- Saurav Das as Matthew
- Gautam Warshi as Hindu Militant
- Masood Akhtar as Hindu Militant
- Subrata Dutta as Hindu Militant