Love's labour's lost

"Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other." – Susan Sontag

If you are looking for a cinematic illustration of Sontag's aphorism, go watch The Japanese Wife. The sin of this bore consists in numbing your senses and making you narcoleptic. But there's a fascinating quality about the film's 105 minutes of pseudo-intellectual nothingness: it gives you valuable insights into the mechanics of modern, "sophisticated" Bengali cinema. In fact, The Japanese Wife is so boring that it makes you feel like writing a discourse on bad filmmaking – from script to camera to acting, the film scores nought on all counts.

The Japanese Wife, Aparna Sen's eighth labour of love as a director, has had a long gestation period. The production started in 2007 and when it finally released in April 2010, expectations from the film had reached a reasonable high. But in comparison with her last three films – Paromitar Ek Din (2000), Mr and Mrs Iyer (2001) and 15 Park Avenue (2005), Sen's screen treatment of Kunal Basu's short story looks like a shiny hack film that doesn't quite fit in with her oeuvre. The Japanese Wife is the first film that sees the director deal with rural life – and make a bungling job of it. She approaches the story with a tourist's curiosity, which is evident in the way the characters "try to speak" in a Sunderbans accent. There are also numerous deliberate stereotypes: Sen takes great care to make the film conform to her target audience's idea of rural Bengal. This forced rusticity renders many supposedly poignant moments laughable.

The film opens in medias res, with village schoolteacher Snehamoy Chatterjee (Rahul Bose) exchanging letters with a Japanese girl named Miyage (Chigusa Takaku). Eventually, the pen friends fall in love and exchange marriage vows. Despite his mashi's insistence that he marry village girl Sandhya (Raima Sen), Snehamoy remains faithful to his Japanese wife, spending time instead writing letters and masturbating on a boat. When Miyage is diagnosed with cancer, Snehamoy tries every means to find a cure for her disease. However, he himself falls sick and dies of pneumonia. The film ends with Miyage coming to Snehamoy's house in the Sunderbans in a widow's dress.

Sluggish pace is the most frustrating defect of The Japanese Wife. Even well into the second half, the audience is kept waiting for something to happen while the lead characters continue with their lazy epistolary romance. The problem is compounded by repetition and gratuitous doses of lengthy scenes. For example, the prolonged kite flying episode where the protagonist's Japanese kites vie with the villagers' Indian kites verges on the absurd. The intended symbolism of the episode is lost even on the most attentive viewer. Small wonder, unable to contain herself, a disgruntled viewer at INOX loudly suggested the film be renamed "Japanese Kites".

It's time Rahul Bose came out of his typecast mould and learned some real acting. His urban, educated, upper-middleclass persona is fit only for an Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury film. His role of a dhoti-clad, bicycle-riding, bad-English-speaking, village schoolteacher in The Japanese Wife remains unconvincing. He gives a juvenile performance that, coupled with his fake Sunderbans accent, evokes only laughter. It's the same with Moushumi Chatterjee's mashi – bad acting mars the complexity of her character of an old, cantankerous widow. Raima Sen as a young widow is passable till she keeps mum. But like the other principals, she also shows the fake accent syndrome. As Miyage, the eponymous Japanese wife, Chigusa Takaku does a good enough job. However, hers is a monodramatic performance that obviates the need for dialogues. The only character that attains any credibility is Paran Bandyopadhyay's character of a village Ayurvedic practitioner.

"A love poem by Aparna Sen" they call the film in the posters. And The Japanese Wife indeed bears the unmistakable signature of Mr and Mrs Iyer's director. But a poor script resulting in slow pace, bad acting and insufficient research make the film a monstrous bore. It seems failing to give her "love poem" an appropriate form and a brisk rhythm, Sen has ended up composing an ambitious limerick with very little to offer.


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