An early scene from debutante director Abhinandan Banerjee’s Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man) reminded me of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023). Shortly after waking up, Manik (Chandan Sen) leans into a flower in his window, and rubs his nose against it. What could be a literal way to depict the saying “stop and smell the roses” – it’s also a scene with exquisite texture, much like Wenders’ film where one can breathe the calm air inside Hirayami’s tiny Tokyo apartment.
Shot in 2019, way before Wenders probably even had the idea for Perfect Days, Banerjee’s film, much like Wender’s latest, is in no rush. It prefers the prelude guitar solo to the chorus, it prefers the writing to the having written, it prefers the journey to the destination. There are similarities between the two films: centred around men marinating in their solitude in the midst of a busy culture. But while Wenders’ film has a joy permeating through it, Banerjee’s film carries an undercurrent of discontentment and loneliness.
Like many others, Manik is leading a less-than-remarkable life in Kolkata.
A lowly clerk, who can afford to snooze with a mountain of files on his desk, he’s also a tutor for poetry recitation. One of his life’s passions are the plants he tends to every morning, on his terrace. Like his plants, Manik also spritzes water on his ailing father, who appears to be suffering from dementia, and seems to have been bed-ridden for a while. Looking at the billboards in the city that constantly remind him of being a failure, Manik can’t do much except look longingly at them.
Having grown up with an adequate distance from Bengali culture, I have always had a contentious relationship with Kolkata (or Calcutta like it was called during my growing up years). Maybe it has something to do with me rejecting its cultural superiority at face value, something that was thrust upon me like an axiom. As someone who refuses to be nostalgic about cities and singling oneself as a “location-agnostic” person, I have never quite been the first in line to fall for Kolkata’s oft-described ‘charm’. In fact, I have always been suspicious of films that unsubtly try to be an ‘ode’ to a city. Even for Banerjee’s film, I was a distant viewer during the initial portions, cynical enough to dub its choice to shoot in black-and-white as a gimmick to look closer to a European art film.
However, as films like Manikbabur Megh often tend to do, they melt away your cynicism by being compelling.
And this point comes in Banerjee’s film, when Manik’s father dies. When Manik wakes up one day, he hears an eerie silence from his father’s room (who usually switches on his tape recorder as soon as the day breaks). When he goes to check on his father, he finds that the cassette has run out.
The rituals for his father’s funeral almost mean like a rebirth for Manik, who shaves off his head and tends to his ragged, unkempt beard. And yet, as he sits on the banks of the Ganga on a hot summer afternoon, a cloud seems to be providing shade to only him. When Manik makes his way home, he notices the cloud following him. When he tells his good friend, Kali (Debesh Roy Chowdhury) about being stalked by a cloud, he is taken to an ophthalmologist (played by Bratya Basu) who concludes there’s nothing wrong with Manik’s sight. And then both Kali and the doctor have a laugh at the expense of this rather strange predicament.
Is Manik losing his mind? Is this his way of processing grief? Are these the earliest signs of dementia he’s exhibiting – like his late father? Banerjee refuses to give us easy answers.
A still from ‘Manikbabur Megh’.
Instead, we see Manik lean into this relationship with the cloud. In two of the most inspiring magic-realism sequences from the film, we first see Manik fly a kite into the cloud – almost like he’s sending a love letter to his beloved. And then the two newly-minted lovers consummate their relationship, when Manik uses the overnight rainwater to shower. It changes the way Manik lives: he starts tending to his appearance, he wears a coat even during hot summer afternoons, there’s a spring in Manik’s step even as he’s left to fend for a new house by his landlord.
Shot vividly by Anup Singh, the film captures Manik’s loneliness in a tram and also his solitude as he lays down on the grass of a lawn, smiling at the sky. It also routinely cuts to the cloud’s point-of-view, seeing Manik for who he really is, another tiny being going about his life. Abhijit Roy’s sound design plays a big part in a film that puts a price on things being said out loud unless absolutely necessary. The score by Subhajit Mukherjee never intrudes into a scene, instead accentuates the feeling in it. The black-and-white visuals frame the poetry in Kolkata’s laidback pace, completely at odds with the real world. Banerjee and his crew manage to strike the (frankly tough) balance of making it seem dreamy, romantic, without letting it tip over to the delusional.
Written and co-produced by Bauddhayan Mukherji, Manikbabur Megh is a love letter to Kolkata – the city that got left behind.
Manik’s character almost feels like a personification of a city that continues to live in the past with simpler ideals, even after being confronted with the constantly shifting goal posts of a ‘happy life’ as defined by the society around us. He might look middle-aged; but Manik hasn’t quite sharpened himself for a life in the ruthless, modern world. But then he probably doesn’t care about the rat race like everyone else, he’s at peace in his own make-believe world, where a cloud’s rumbling is the only conversation he needs in his life.
There is a hint of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers here too, in which a screenwriter starts talking to his dead parents, once he starts writing about his childhood. Both films probe their protagonists’ sanity, as they cope with suppressed grief of losing a loved one. Like Manik, has the screenwriter lost his mind? But when it offers comfort, closure and results in you (briefly) living your best life – can you even call it a manic episode?
