AAVISHKAR (1973)

“I love you because you are ‘You’ and you love me because I am ‘I’. But marriage will make us ‘We’,” a lover is trying to convince her beloved in one of the scene of the film.
What happens to their love post-marriage is the story quite relevant to most of the married couples- After initial few years the mirror images to impress the other ceased and the charm of romance lost its touch in mundane routine and inconvenient reality and all of sudden this ‘We’ lost its unification and becomes separated ‘I’ and ‘You’ and the relationship starts eroding the mutual life and consent.

Unlike his other films this is very personal, intrinsic and minimalist film made by Basu Bhattacharya. He used long camera shots portraying so many abstract things under the impression of ‘Visual Expressionism’ in the lineage of Ray. Sometimes film seems totally poetic and sometimes too boring to bear. What carried me to watch this film is Basuda’s fine whisper to all married couples who haven’t discovered the delight of their mutual life under the harsh reality of urban life, pressure of workforce and relationship that sucks. The film has just two actors in lead- Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore and both of them gave fine performance. In few of the scenes Khanna shows his trademark dramatics but if you keep them by side, Basuda kept him quite restrained. Sharmila Tagore once again proves that why she was called ‘darling’ by Satyajit Ray. She got the most beautiful and expressive eyes and her portrayal of ‘Manasi’ is one of her most intense one may be still unnoticed by many.

Its not usual entertainment but quite serious artistic film demanding hell lot of patience and passion for cinema.

Ratings- 7/10