Movie Review: 36 Chowringhee Lane

36 Chowringhee Lane, the directorial debut of Aparna Sen in 1981, is well deservedly among the best alternative Indian cinema. Aparna Sen has been a successful actress since her debut at 16 years of age in Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya. Since then she has acted in a number of Bengali movies and in alternative Indian movies as well as acting in a few Merchant-Ivory movies. Since 36 Chowringhee lane she went on to make a number of movies in Bengali and English, including her latest movie, Mr. & Mrs. Iyer.

36 Chowringhee Lane, is the story of an old Anglo-Indian school teacher in Calcutta. The movie is set in the late 70s, more than 30 years after India achieved its independence from the British. Jennifer Kendal plays the school teacher, Miss Violet Stoneham. She lives alone (with her cat Sir Toby) and has a brother Eddie in an old age home. Eddie is played by Geoffrey Kendal, the father of Jennifer. Her lonely life is very structured with visiting the graveyard, teaching at the school and visiting her diabetic brother at the old age home. Her life has become more lonely since her loving niece, Rosemary (Soni Razdan) has gotten married and gone away to Australia. This lonely life gets a revival when she runs into one of her ex-students Nandita ( Debashree Roy) one Christmas morning. Nandita and her boyfriend Samaresh Moitra get invited to her house for a cup of coffee since it is Christmas day. They acquiesce to go to her place much to Samaresh's dismay since he wanted to go on a Taxi ride somewhere so they could neck. With hard to find places of solitude, they fall in love with Miss Stoneham's house and think it would save them a bundle on cab fares and also give them the privacy to enjoy each other's company more. Samaresh acts like he needs a place to write, since he is a 'poet' and Miss Stoneham the dear that she is easily agrees to let them use her apartment for writing.

Of course Samaresh does not write anything and Nandita and he are always present at her home when she gets back from school, keeping her house warm and her tea ready. They interact with her a lot and they go out for walks and many such outings while they are utilizing her apartment. One evening when Miss Stoneham comes home and does espy them kissing each other passionately. She is a bit shocked at first but smiles eventually. Soon they become a part of her daily life till one day Samaresh gets a job and he and Nandita are to get married. Once they get married, they have no real use for Miss Stoneham or her apartment, after they have got everything they want from her. While they are not entirely cruel, they fail to realize (or ignore) how much they were a part of her life in that time frame. It is the story of how Miss Stoneham comes to terms with the reality and the following disillusionment of how she will remain in the periphery of this social society with nobody to care for her at all.

Jennifer Kendal does an excellent job as Miss Stoneham, the English school teacher who loves Shakespeare. The movie really captures the loneliness which not only age but the changing world brings. Miss Stoneham is really British but she was born and has lived her entire life in India and where does one go when one has based their entire life in a place and then they have to up and go and become strangers in a strange land. The movie is a very emotional movie trying to capture a number of different aspects; loneliness, being expatriates in India and the disillusionment. Aparna Sen who also wrote the story does a great job at capturing the essence of loneliness in Miss Stoneham's life in depicting her daily life. She does do a dream sequence which appears to be her tribute to Fellini. The music in the movie is a medley of Christmas songs, 60s pop and western classical music. Overall the movie richly deserves all the accolades it gets.