Dreamlike and wistful, Manikbabur Megh is a fable on a strange connection

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the state of contemporary Bengali cinema, justifiably so. Drowned out by a barrage of stock, pedantic situations dutifully recycled, a style of performance constrained by a constantly overstating tone and a complete scarcity of a desire to intellectually engage the viewer, films emerging from this corner of India have been having the roughest phase for a long while. Coming as a startling burst of hope, romance and the whimsical, Abhinandan Banerjee’s Manikbabur Megh ( The Cloud and the Man) takes a nonchalant, restful yet daring break from what we have been so tiringly subjected to. Amidst the routine-ness of industry fare, the film is a recalibration of expectation on a sensory and intimate level, attuning our gaze to the cracks running through physical as well as emotional surfaces.

Opening in the middle-aged tenant, Manik’s ( Chandan Sen) spaces, there is an immediate evocation of decay, of a life in stasis or simply one left far behind. There’s not much Banerjee’s delicately measured , spare screenplay chooses to expand on in terms of Manik’s past. But there’s no need to. It’s a man whose lived reality strikes an instant, universal intonation. Manik lives with his bedridden father. The rhythms of caregiving seem to be the only thing on which his entire existence is perched, pushing him to live out another day. That Manik wakes up every morning to the same old tunes of Moloyo Batashe drifting from his father’s room, signalling the resumption of a mechanical cycle of habit, acts as a device condensing the humdrum rhythms of his life. The other things he religiously tends to are his plants on the terrace and the street dogs he feeds. Manik drifts through the motions of the day almost like a phantom, detached and dispassionate. On the way to his clerical job, the varied hoardings, connoting luxury, love, security and essentially all the things he may never have, serve to accentuate a repressed depth of emotion.

Terse, barely engaging with anyone, every iota of his feelings is held back, clipped beneath a tight shell that refuses to open up. He is a complete social oddity. He has no friends except one, Kali, who is obviously a poseur. Though this isn’t any intimate friendship, Manik reposes in him trust to a degree, with tragic but not unpredictable consequences.

Monalisa Mukherji’s remarkably attentive production design is integral to establishing a rich sense of Manik’s personhood, effortlessly segueing from externalised signifiers developing his relationship to the spaces he occupies, be it his home or office, to an inner hollowing-out. Dust has settled everywhere in a layer, including on the portrait of his mother on the wall. From the spiderweb mottling nooks of the bathroom walls to the carelessly dumped sheaf of papers on a chair, it’s a life that pays little or no heed to its disarray. It’s like he knows his existence is in shambles but he doesn’t have the energy or interest to stir it back into any semblance of a bustling, genuinely absorbed life. Right after experiencing a major loss, the most unexpected kind of stimulus that re-awakens him takes the shape of a cloud which he is convinced is tailing him everywhere he goes. Initially, he is terrified, trying to flee. Nobody believes him and dismisses him as a loony fit. He is anyway perceived as a peculiarity. The violin riffs excellently draws out the first tide of panic that grips him. Gradually, however, he begins to lean into banking on the cloud, almost as an emotional, ultimately romantic partner. The first time the cloud ‘responds’, a spell of rain that erupts, as if acknowledging his whole existence and acceding to the birth of a bond between them, is pure magic. Banerjee stages the transcending stages of the relationship with innocence and intelligence. The delight and euphoria that Sen embodies, as he caresses and gently kisses his kite that had flown into the cloud cover, is the spark that seals the bond, including an exquisitely allusive communion.

Then there is the wonderful congruence of the sound design ( Abhijit Tenny Roy) and music ( Subhajit Mukherjee). The film is highly contained in the internal landscapes of the protagonist. His subjective experience mediates our interaction with the film. Mukherjee’s music is key to the disorienting, exultant rise from the mundane to the surreal.

Each of these elements could only have been marshalled into place through a central performance quietly capable of straddling the shifting beats of the character’s journey. In Chandan Sen’s unforgettable performance that should dominate year-ender lists, there’s a lifetime of desolation. The emptiness in his eyes hang thick over the early stretches of the film. The film becomes very much a compelling character study in Sen’s hands. For most of the film, he doesn’t have the clutch of dialogues. The lack of it seems to have lent a jolt of expansive freedom to the actor’s interpretations, an ironic counterpoint to the cloistering, too-defined patterns of Manik babu’s life. Watch how he slowly enhances his performance from the initial vacant-eyed, hollowed-out demeanour to a vivid sense of re-animation. Gaining this new, unlikely companion, the lid on his being lifts.

Shot in black and white by Anup Singh who can lace any speck of everyday scene like an image of bare branches with a dense emotional gust, the beauty of Manikbabur Megh is in Banerjee’s tender, unfussy touch. This is a director thrillingly secure in a use of the cinematically economical. Every mode in his telling is deliberately stripped-down, artfully pared back to reveal just the essentials of a hidden nevertheless palpable inner life. There’s rejection, betrayal, heartbreak but also a giddying sublimation in this entrancing tale, every understated emotional beat neatly spun together in Abhro Banerjee’s editing. In the hubbub of expository, underlined cinema, Manikbabur Megh is a leisurely, yet precise step back. This is a debut of uncommon control, poise and elegance.