Belashuru Movie Review: Soumitra Chatterjee is the only takeaway from the film

Alzheimer's patients are not uni-dimensional creatures. They are complex individuals, who get disconnected from themselves and lose their bearing on life slowly or fast. In the throes of their unfortunate condition, they are relentlessly stubborn; in their sane moments, they can be selfish and mean. No one knows when they will switch from one to the other, least of all themselves. Just a lone family member can’t handle them, especially if they are prone to aggressive behaviour. Even a combination of family and trained care can fall short.

In severe forms of the disease, this is all the more so, as the patients lose all agency over their bodies. But there is also a different problem then: They are completely at the mercy of others, who can take advantage of the patients’ extreme vulnerability and abuse their power over them.

Alzheimer's is thus a multi-dimensional curse both for the patient and their caregivers. This is totally missing in Nandita Roy and Shiboporosad Mukherjee’s Belashuru.

HOW BELASHURU HANDLED IT

Arati (Swatilekha Sengupta) is an infantile Alzheimer's patient, looked after devotedly by Bishwanath (Soumitra Chatterjee), her husband of 50 years. In all the 140 minutes of the film’s run-time, we get nothing other than her infantility and his devotion. There is a small bristly moment at the beginning, where their only son (Shankar Chakraborty) accuses him of doing everything out of guilt (for not having given any time to his wife before), but the dramatic possibilities of that strain are not developed beyond the one rare moment of self-reflection in the film, where Bishwanath says, just when he thought he would start over a new life with his wife, truly “together”, she couldn’t recognise him anymore! His youngest daughter (Monami Ghosh) echoes this sentiment, lamenting to her elder sister (Rituparna Sengupta) that just when she needed her mother the most, she was lost to her.

I found Arati to be an incredibly lucky old woman. Not only does she have a husband who combs her hair (Amul has created a meme out of this touching detail), cleans her feet, flushes her toilet and feeds her with infinite patience; but she also has four children who — without a thought — swoop down to her side in Santiniketan from Kolkata and Bombay (spouses and children in tow), go in search of her childhood across the border in Faridpur, and marry her again to her “bor” (groom) in the hope that re-living the most precious moment of her life will open up the floodgates to the memory of her later self and lead to the recognition of her husband.

They give her time, leaving aside their busy lives. That is how it should be, ideally; but in reality, this is hardly the case. Not because the children don’t care, but because the brute realities of their lives don’t allow them to. Atanu Ghosh’s Mayurakshi (2017) and Indrasis Acharya’s Pupa (2017) deal with this seamy side of filial responsibility with greater candidness.

The time and concern of loved ones apart, the other prime factors that determine the nature of caregiving for an elderly Alzheimer's patient (or any patient for that matter) are space and money. The Sarkars in Belasheshe don’t lack these either. I’m not trying to make a case here against the sorrows of privileged people; I’m myself one of them. I just have a problem with the reluctance of the directors to have anything more than a mild engagement with the real issue. There is far more awfulness to Alzheimer's than what we see here (with comic relief galore, by the way, and the inevitable song-and-dance thrown in).

Watch the trailer of Belashuru here:

HOW OTHER FILMS HANDLED IT

A more mature handling of the subject can be found in Sraboner Dharar Moto (2020) where Soumitra had played the Alzheimer's patient. He, too, couldn’t recognize his spouse (Gargi Roychowdhury) - his second and much younger wife - who devotes herself to his care; and accepts the irony of playing his first wife, long dead, whom he remembers with crystal clarity. The doctor (Parambrata Chatterjee) played a more significant role in that film (unlike Kaushik Sen in this), and there was some serious delving into the nature of this disease. But the parallel story of the doctor in the narrative gained precedence after a while, and the film became something other than what it seemed to promise.

The most heart-wrenching representation of the disease can, however, be found in Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020)! It’s a must-watch if one wants to understand the mind of such a patient, and the actual nature of this blight. It’s impossible to take sides while watching this film. One finds oneself constantly oscillating between the predicament of the father (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and the daughter (Olivia Colman) — as the former sinks more deeply into this condition and the latter tries her best to care for him and also save her relationship with her partner (though we are left unsure till the very end who that actually is).

To watch this film is to be left unsure about the nature of reality itself — as we are made to “experience” dementia and not just be told a story “about” it. To watch the film is also to learn to be compassionate about the pitiless realities of old age as they consume the one who is going through it and those who love and care for him.

THE SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE EFFECT

That “pitiless” aspect is wholly missing in Belashuru. I will, however, remember the film only for Soumitra Chatterjee. The pain in his eyes, when his wife repeatedly fails to recognise him; his sense of helplessness, culminating in the moment where he declares he is too tired for new experiments; and his resignation to his reality in the last few minutes of the film, these will stay with me.

In an early scene, while explaining to his children why he will never take his wife to Kolkata, he says: She hates noise, and the metropolis is too full of it; she won’t be able to survive there. She needs the peace and quiet of Santiniketan. She finally has it when the children leave. They are the “noise” that she can do without; they take away from the poignancy of the story. At least, in my reading.