Manikbabur Megh review: Abhinandan Banerjee and Chandan Sen present a magical love song through their cinema

Chandan Sen’s Manikbabur Megh is clearly a disruption in the current space of the Bengali cinema. It is nothing that one wants to watch and yet it is everything that we cherish on the screen.

Chandan Sen in Manikbabur Megh

Manikbabur Megh

Manikbabur Megh story: 

Manikbabu (Chandan Sen) lives a lonely life. He is first chased and then romanced by a whiff of cloud that only he can see.

Manikbabur Megh review: 

What do we see when we look at the sky? Manikbabu sees a whiff of cloud that refuses to leave him. He decides to embrace that celestial piece of cloud in his life. This lonely man and his quirky environment – his noisy ceiling fan, his rooftop greenhouse, the hanging lizard in the bathroom, the pile of files on his office table, and so on – tell a lot of hitherto bottled-up stories. The film is a collage of those chronicles. 

Like Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look At The Sky, Manikbabur Megh, essentially, is a fantasy love story. In the Georgian-German film, a roadside seedling, a CCTV camera, a drainpipe, and the wind warn a woman of a curse of identity right at the moment she falls in love with a man. In Manikbabur Megh, a man, despite all the warnings, falls in love with a whiff of cloud. The cloud, like The Red Balloon, follows him wherever he goes. 

Also read: Exclusive! Abhinandan Banerjee’s Manikbabur Megh to be screened at Cannes Marchè Du Film 

Evidently, Manikbabur Megh is a deeply personal film for Abhinandan. The director takes his own time to design every shot, every sound, and every cut of the film. As a result, the clamour of the city, the noise of the fan, the recurring aerial view of Manikbabu’s terrace, the two measured gibberish from his father and the other constant motifs become a treat to savour. The sound design of the film becomes an integral character in Manikbabur Megh.

This is a film about Manikbabu – a regular, real man with a surreal core. Chandan Sen takes a masterclass in acting through Abhinandan’s film. Every gaze he makes, every bereavement he expresses, and every smile he smiles, he makes Manikbabu real, right in front of us. It is an utter disappointment that we get to explore the acting calibre of this criminally under-utilised actor primarily through television characters. He deserves much better. 

Bratya Basu appears in just one sequence and makes an eternal impact in the film. Debesh Roy Chowdhury and Arun Guha Thakurta are sublime. This is not a film that projects a lot of acting. It is their restraint that makes Manikbabur Megh a pleasurable watch.  

Also read: Manikbabur Megh: Actor Chandan Sen wins the Best Actor Award at a Russian film festival 

The film is also dotted with breathtaking shots. Shot in black and white, some of the frames, occasionally, appear to be too decked up to be true. That, in fact, shadows the magic momentarily. However, another remarkable imagery, like the discards in dhapa (the landfill) or the silent greed for sweets dunked in syrup, brings back the magic realism that Manikbabu banks on.  

Manikbabur Megh verdict: 

Manikbabur Megh is clearly a disruption in the current space of the Bengali cinema. It is nothing that one wants to watch and yet it is everything that we cherish on the screen. It is magical. It reinstates our faith in the magic of cinema. It gives us hope that cinema can be made not just to sell at the counter but to savour. It is a film for the ardent lovers of cinema. It is not to be missed. Go, watch it before it disappears in a thin cloud.

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