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he new film, signalling a great opus in the making, directed by Nabyendu Chatterjee, is nearly complete. Being made under the full production scheme of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), Sanskar, somewhat, indicates a clear departure in terms of content and form, diction and morphology and ideas and perception. In his new film Sanskar, it is a different idea, a different perception towards fashionable reality that prompts Nabyendu Chatterjee to take a voyage into a world, where conventional social codes and chic values ultimately rule the roost. The flash crumbling of sustained human values suddenly take a nosedive due to a death of a professor, unannounced, unpredicted of a highly educated man known for his left idealism and Marxist values. And when this death occurs in a brothel in one stormy night, the match-stick social codes tumble at the fall of the hat, sparking off a huge controversy in the family and societal perimeter, involving all - the members of the family, friends, admirers and students. No doubt, this is the first time Nabyendu Chatterjee, a director of twelve outstanding feature films, winners of national and international awards, has taken up a subject, quite elliptical and solipsistic, to attempt a purification of social values.

Says Nabyendu Chatterjee, “This time I have almost deliberately ignored the trodden path of narration and embarked upon a cathartic idea to cleanse the dirt we inherit in the name of social values. For a long time, the desire was germinating in me and turning and whirling in my inner domain. And in fact, once I went ahead to make the film taking it as an outrageous adventure. But then I made a pause and thought to keep it lying forsome more time to ripen to its natural fruition. ” To be frank, the films of Nabyendu Chatterjee scarcely dig in liturgic digesis; in other words story-telling or plot invention. Take for example, Shilpi and Mansur Mian-r-Ghora where he indulges in an interior journey rather than showing hard-stuff to shoot home his point. With his snowballing experience he seems to prefer to blend physical reality with fictive reality with unique semblance. Story-telling or plot-laying is rather an easy method which Nabyendu Chatterjee has come to believe now. It is more of an inner voyage which he prefers to take now by using fluid elements of a reality in which we all live. On the preference of style of making films, he almost believes, “Style is the art of seeing.”

Says he, “I think, I have enough changed my style of filmmaking in the recent years where so much aesthetic employment of fluid imagination has been in use. Because, I believe, the visual medium is basically a poetic medium that demands exercise of one’s mind and imagination other than factually grafting hard-crusted plot sensuality.” In the new film he has only introduced an idea, an elemental reality but never a plot what we find in orthodox sense. He tells this critic, “The reason is simple. In a cinematic medium which is a poetic medium we need to open up so many layers of an idea, an event, a landscape of rains, a death, a birth etc and for this we should see that subtle nuances of the expressions are offered an artistic finish.”

How does one measure such value system, given our mental frame-work we have grown with?

“Our value system”, says the director, “is brittle, so thin. Give it a little push and it shakes and crumbles.” Nabyendu Chatterjee as an artist and social being is being tormented by various social codes, nearly cobwebby and flaky. We are given to understand by the director that our society is based on certain values, often conventional or otherwise extremely modern, but not always on something orchestrated that stays even after it receives a thud. Nabyendu Chatterjee narrates a slew of anecdotes that really call for expose in the visual medium. Says he, “In our real life we often confront bizarre situations where something happens just by an accident. It is not pre-planned. It is not pre-conceived or imposed from outside. It just happens under a twist of circumstances beyond one’s control. And the fallen man in such situation needs a pure, round and honest reckoning which we don’t always do.” He feels that thus by our own doubtful assumptions, we start examination, an autopsy of a strange event, very unusual from normal point-of-view and make things more complex, so complex that under the same burden we seem to sink to an abyss of no-return.

In Sanskar, as progression affirms, we are in the fancy court of self-judgment and make our slim decision, right or wrong. Novelty imbues the film in that where moral elements clash with temporal reality. In a way it can be called a self-autopsy of sorts. According to the director, perhaps we live in an age of frailty, fear and morbidity. Here forces of miscalculations seem to have carried the day. Life cannot be measured in terms of judgment merely born of false assumptions. This film makes it clear that in a given situation, even a strong character, a strong ethical deal, a huge burden of morality may bend and break not because of conscious move but because of sudden, unseen causality.

“He seems to suggest that our so-called valued personal feelings help form our judgments based on edifice which itself is flossy, brittle, immoral. And you need to hit it hard.” Here he sounds something like Spaniard maestro Luis Bunuel who once declared, “Morality, middle-class morality is immoral for me.” And now when the film is nearly made visible, Nabyendu Chatterjee takes a second bite at the cherry and tells this critic how “optimistic” he feels of the final impact the film would come to create for us. This critic along with his innumerable film-buffs thinks Sanskar, produced by the NFDC, is sure to provide a proverbial “Midas” touch to the art of good cinema.