Shades of Kurosawa’s Ikiru resurface in the Bengali film Bridge

Watanabe, the old man, has recently come to know of his stomach cancer. It has thrown his life out of shape. He reflects on how futile his existence has been for the last few decades, while he has been working as a bureaucrat in a dull office with indifferent co-workers. He meets Toyo, a young woman who has just resigned from the same office. “Boredom,” she says is her reason for moving out, “Each day is as predictable as the last.”

Watanabe seeks her company for one day to traverse the city in search of visual pleasures, emotive joys and more importantly to ‘live’ life before it actually withers away. He confesses to Toyo the fear he experienced as a child when he was drowning in a pond. He is succumbing to the same fear again as he laments—“My son is somewhere far, far away. Just as my parents were when I was drowning in that pond.” Fear, anxiety, moments of insurmountable grief and loneliness, and finally a toast to life are what make Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru ( To Live , 1952) an all-time classic in world cinema.

No release here

The reference to Ikiru resurfaces in Amit Ranjan Biswas’s grave yet sensitively poignant Bengali film Bridge, which proclaims the timelessness of life and the fact that every life has meaning. Though made a few years ago, the film, starring the legendary Soumitra Chatterjee and Sandhya Mridul, has not been able to find a release yet. It has travelled to Worldfest Houston, New Hope Film Festival, Melbourne Indian Film Festival and Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival.

In Bridge, too, the central character is an old man contemplating death, and it is a young woman who opens the metaphorical windows for him—albeit in different ways. The film brings together two strangers—Santanu, an octogenarian (played by Chatterjee), and Tanima (Mridul), a young woman—on a bridge on the Ganges where both have gone to commit suicide. Santanu is withdrawn from life and is on anti-depressants that don’t work.

Tanima is also in a psychological cocoon ; she never speaks and is in a state of denial. The doctor who checks her soon after the suicide attempt suggests that she may be pregnant—we never find out if that is true.

There are two fleeting images associated with Tanima that recur multiple times—a young boy who goes out of a corridor or through a door as if it is her own self that wishes to break free but cannot. The second image is that of physical abuse where we find her beaten up, probably by her husband, for reasons unknown to us. The husband comes back later to take Tanima away.

These provide us with the ambiguity and trauma associated with Tanima. In contrast, Santanu’s loneliness and depression is marked with simple flashbacks—of his wife who passed away on a Puja day and their daughter who has cancer. In one deft piece of imagery we find Babi, the daughter, looking down from her window to the street below where life goes on. She is, unlike Charu of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata , not observing the world from her room. Yet, the street below for both Babi and Charu speaks of freedom from their claustrophobic lives.

Triumph over life

The river acts as a metaphor for life. It returns again in the end when Tanima comes to the same bank with Santanu. They both sit for a while without speaking a word, and then Tanima smears her face with mud. She becomes almost emblematic of Kali, both destroyer and creator. And then Tanima walks into the river. The water engulfs her in front of Santanu’s terrified eyes and then within a moment she resurfaces—her face now clean of dirt, a resurrection that triumphs over life.

“I want to, but I can’t die. I can’t bring myself to die,” Watanabe tells a novelist he meets at a bar right after he receives news of his illness. The novelist replies philosophically, “We’ve got to be greedy about living. We learned that greed is a vice, but that’s old. Greed is a virtue, especially greediness for life.”

This greediness for life is what Santanu discovers when he gets a chance to look beyond himself and at Tanima’s survival instincts. In the process of Tanima’s healing, Santanu gets resurrected too. If the Ganges epitomises the flow of life, the bridge is the connection between hearts.

Soumitra’s eloquence, his brilliant expressions and voice modulations are similar to Shimura’s. In Bridge, too, Soumitra provides classic moments, his face a canvas of a war-ravaged landscape.

Soumitra turns Santanu’s feelings into those of every human being in self-doubt. In the end, like Watanabe, Santanu also finds a reason to live.

The writer is an independent film scholar and critic and edits the film magazineSilhouette.

Greed is a virtue, especially greediness for life