Movie: Mr and Mrs Iyer

Actors: Rahul Bose, Konkana Sen-Sharma
Director: Aparna Sen, Producer: Aparna Sen

Movie Review

Trapped In A Communal Riot

- Aparna Sen’s new film ‘Mr & Mrs Iyer’

Reviewed by Anil Saari Arora


A sense of menace pervades Aparna Sen’s new film ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer’, as it thrusts us into a cauldron of fear, the kind of fear that would overtake us if we got caught in the middle of a riot. In this case, a communal riot that constantly threatens to singe the passengers of a public bus traveling down from the hills in north-east India to the nearest railway station.

This is a film at par with Mani Ratnam’s ‘Bombay’ and Mehul Kumar’s ‘Krantiveer’ in its horrifying disposition. Perhaps even more so than ‘Bombay’, because in ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer’ the communal conflagration threatens continuously to overtake the bus on its way to the nearest railway station – that is, for most of the film’s duration. There is no respite till the very end, as we are trapped with wildlife photographer Jehangir “Raja” Chadhuri, who is frightened of being identified as “one of the others” by the rioters.

Unlike ‘Bombay’ and ‘Krantiveer’, Aparna Sen’s film had a much smaller budget to work on and this is obvious in the sparsely populated backdrop of the drama. However, the actress-director, who had made such a name for herself as a film-maker with movies like ’36 Chowringhee Lane’ and ‘Paroma’, overcomes these financial hurdles dexterously - through a brilliantly structured screenplay, a reverberating soundtrack and an effective cinematization of mood.; backed by a very good handling of the actors.

There has been a spate of English-language films by Indian directors in recent times. Among these, ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer’ ranks among the best we’ve had. As a movie, I put in the same class as Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Bend It Like Beckam’ and, among the Hindi films I have truly liked in recent years, with Madhur Bhandarkar’s ‘Chandni Bar’.

However, it would be difficult to predict if it will make as much of an impact on the box office in India as the other two films, because Aparna Sen’s movie is more somber and despondent. It offers no respite to our apprehensions on being trapped along with the film’s victim-protagonist, and it has no popular, showbiz elements. I do hope, however, that it is seen widely by middle-class India, because this is very much the story of middle-class people.

The screenplay of ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer’ has one of those internal twists which when located at the very core of the movie’s concept, give the screenplay an edge and a dramatic timbre of its own. This narrative twist is so deeply embedded at the nucleus of the story that it need not be spelt out, because this is also what the movie is about, at the not-so-obvious level.

The story starts off at a non-descript bus stand in the hilly north-east. A young Tamil woman, Mrs. Iyer, played by debutante Konkana Sen-Sharma, is escorted by her father, a senior forest officer, to catch a bus that goes to the nearby railway station, from where she is to catch the train to Kolkata (Calcutta). At the bus stand they are introduced to Raja Chaudhuri, a wildlife photographer, who is also returning to Kolkata.

Since the young Mrs. Iyer is traveling with her baby boy, Mr. Iyer requests young Raja Chaudhuri (played by Rahul Bose) to look after her during the journey. On this contact-point are we introduced to the film’s leading protagonists. However, the subterranean narrative twist is that it is the young woman who has to “protect” the young man who had been “appointed” to look after her during the journey.

The rather typical and stereotyped middle-class bus journey quickly runs into an enigmatic barrier. The main road is blocked. The bus driver and the conductor decide to take a detour, but they are soon halted by a queue of buses and trucks because traffic has been brought to a standstill. It takes a few minutes before the film tells us why this road, too, is closed. A police jeep drives up, the travelers are warned that a communal riot has broken out in the countryside, and the first strains of fear begin to engulf everybody.

Raja Chaudhuri, the photographer, wants to leave immediately and hide in the hills, because he is a Muslim and his formal name is Jehangir Chaudhuri. The young woman’s trepidations and a fear of the unknown persuade Chaudhuri to stay on for the time being. Before he can make up his mind about what he should do, a mob of rioters surround the bus. Two of the ringleaders force their way into the bus and begin a man-by-man inspection of the passengers, forcing the men among the passengers to roll down their pants and “show” that they are not circumcised Muslims.

Raja Chaudhuri ossifies in fear in his seat. The vigilantes move closer. Suddenly, and instinctively, the young Mrs. Iyer thrusts her baby into Chaudhuri’s arms and tells him to keep his mouth shut. The prominence of her sindoor and her mangalsutra, the Hindu wife’s cognizable symbols, dissuade the vigilante ringleaders from cross-questioning them, as she tells them tremulously that they are Mr and Mrs Iyer on their way to Kolkata.

The vigilantes move down the bus. Abruptly, one forty-something male passenger jumps up hysterically and points to an old couple that the vigilantes had overlooked. They are Muslims, he shrieks out, catch them! Thus a toothless, fumbling, dazed octogenarian is “requested” by the vigilantes to come down from the bus. His aged wife is ignored, but she insists on accompanying her husband to the very end. Their lives were forfeited because, it turns out, the “informer’ being a Jew was also circumcised and feared he would be killed by the vigilantes as a Muslim.

In these night scenes lasting but five minutes, Aparna Sen’s film drowns us in its cauldron of fear. As Raja Chaudhuri and Mrs Iyer grope through the seared countryside, we continue to be terrorized along with them. This, quite clearly, is our horror-film, of life in a communalized society.

I think it is only towards the end of the movie, as Mrs Iyer and Raja finally begin to find their way to refuge, that the screenplay betrays itself. At this point the director introduces an element of conventional attraction between the film’s young protagonists. Some sort of love unspoken begins to resonate in the shadows of their relationship. One could describe this as a filmic compulsion, but I wish Aparna Sen had wholly avoided this element. It might have been more convincing to have defined their bonding in terms of a deep and unexpected friendship. It would have been truer and more realistic, I feel, but that is not to detract from the immense power of her new film.

**** ENDS ****