- Date of Release: 14 February 2025
- Genre: Drama
- Language: Bengali
- Watch On: KIFF'25
Nadharer Bhela
Exploitation, detachment, and the male gaze are among the few themes explored in this three-hour tale directed by Pradipta Bhattacharya. ‘Nadharer Bhela’ (The slowman and his raft) ‘s basic narrative quite suitably justifies the mundane existence of the characters in the film. It’s the deconstruction of hope, the expectation that every person adheres to. Life as we live and breathe imposes constraints and rules on us until the very end. We dream, we hope, and ultimately succumb to a delusion of happiness through materialistic pleasures. The film has quite a different take on aspirations, ambitions, and ultimately, where it leads.
Nadhar(Amit Saha) (probably suffering from a form of Parkinson’s disease, Bradykinesia ) is an extremely slow man wrt his every motor function, which kind of alienates him from the society where everything is moving at breakneck speed. The subtext here is quite explicit: the sheer contrast of Nadhar with today’s world is a sharp outcry for the loss of compassion in today’s exploitative world.
The film is set in a remote village of Nadia District, where modernization has reached like debris of a nuclear war. The people there resort to cheap thrills presented in the ongoing circus to satisfy their desires with no remorse and school their inferiors in morality. A synecdoche of modern one-dimensional society.
Pradipta Bhattacharya beautifully uses the village as a backdrop, and it becomes a recurring, undeniable presence in the minds of viewers. Let’s take an instance, where a Hindu cremation blazes quietly behind the circus, its flames licking the night with sacred finality. Just steps away, villagers cheer as scantily clad performers gyrate to garish song numbers—cheap thrills wrapped in sequins and neon. A conscious choice to take these two scenes, which also happen simultaneously, is an exploration of transcendence and titillation happening such a few metres apart.
Nadhar, despite being an outcast, is always an object of exploitation. His mother, his employer, and his few coworkers always try and milk his disability for their needs. That being said, the female workers in the circus are also subject to male gazes. Despite playing a pious woman in a mythological play of the circus, Shyama(Priyanka Sarkar), her aspirations to become an actress are sabotaged by the exploitative, abusive circus owner Haru (Ritwick Chakraborty). An object of desire, Shyama finds a different gaze from Nadhar, whose eyes fixated on her during the show, doesn’t evoke desire or lust, but admiration.
The tangled, transactional dynamic between circus players Shyama, Rupa (Satakshi Nandy), and Rahman (Sayan Ghosh) is steeped in self-interest and survival, yet not entirely devoid of humanity, be it the common hatred for their employer, Haru, or a sense of empathy towards Nadhar; it shows although with a purpose, they have not gone entirely cynical.
Joydeep Dey’s frames speak volumes, be it the bedazzling neon lights of the circus or the burning pyre of a corpse, an intimate introspection of contrast already mentioned above. It gives you a non-urban gaze in the village with no filters, just raw and unhinged.
As much as this is a Pradipta Bhattacharya passion project, this is also a Satyaki Banerjee joint; his lyrics mirror each character’s position whenever placed in the film.
Priyanka Sarkar brings her A game to play her character, possibly her greatest performance, and one of the most vulnerable roles she has played ever. Satakshi and Sayan are also effortless.
Ritwick Chakraborty is back with another towering performance, what a performer! A thoroughly disdainful character with no moral complex, no redeeming factors, Ritwick is completely at the pinnacle of his craft.
Amit Saha has given maybe the most impactful, physically believable performance in a Bengali film. It is not easy to play a character like Nadhar, with so many checkboxes to fill. He completely submerges in the need of the character; his eyes speak volumes because the character has minimal dialogue in the film. It is his performance that sometimes keeps the indulgent runtime in the film watchable.
The film’s runtime stretches to 3 hours, with the director himself being the editor of the film. It is very indulgent in various places; the intention was clear: to show the suffering, hopelessness of the individuals, but still the redundancy of a few scenes was glaringly noticeable.
The subtext, as I said, was way too explicit to be called subtle; therefore, the meta commentary, though understood, doesn’t do much except for Amit Saha’s performance as Nadhar.
A more meditative or languid narration was needed, which I admit is a pure creative choice of the makers, kind of disconnects the sympathy the characters needed at the end. The climax, which was shot and acted with absolute peak poetic lyricism, would have worked more, I guess.
Nevertheless, a much crisper editing was needed; apart from that,”Nadharer Bhela” is a Bengali film made by a Bengali for the Bengalis with a rooted cultural and social context, which is a rare sight nowadays.