Veteran actress Sharmila Tagore plays not just an actor but a vessel of memories — hers, ours, and that of Bengali cinema’s golden lineage — in Suman Ghosh’s latest film Puratawn — The Ancient, which marks her return to Bengali cinema after 16 years.
Puratawn — The Ancient is a quiet and reflective piece about ageing, time, and the fragmentary nature of recollection, which gives Sharmila a role that seems more like a series of memories than a character.
Sharmila plays an octogenarian woman battling a slow, inevitable loss of memory, possibly Alzheimer’s disease. She clings onto her past. Fragments of old Rabindranath Tagore books, a 1974 bank passbook, a 1978 club membership slip, a harmonium with broken reeds, a wooden stick from Puri, and a dusty radio— all physical repositories of a mind losing its moorings— are her biggest treasures.
As Mamoni (Sharmila) recedes into a private world, her daughter Ritika (Rituparna Sengupta) struggles to bridge the emotional chasm that widens between them.
Ritika, an executive in a multinational firm, is practical, grounded in the routines of modern life. Her unease with her mother’s condition isn’t just clinical — it’s existential. How do you care for someone who might be present but not fully there? How do you mourn someone who hasn’t left yet?
Rituparna plays Ritika with a quiet desperation. There’s a particularly poignant scene in the family storeroom, a place surrounded by remnants of a childhood lost to time, where she relives a flood of memories. She arranges her mother’s birthday celebration with tender thoughtfulness, gifting her forgotten relics of the past. You realise that her role is not merely to take care of her mother, but to decode who this woman was, and who she might still be.
Indraneil Sengupta plays Ritika’s estranged husband Rajeev, a wildlife photographer and a man grappling with the emotional hangover of a broken marriage. His character is written with restrained melancholy, and Indraneil matches it with a performance that brims with bottled pain.
Ghosh’s direction is intentionally oblique. He doesn’t spell things out. Rather, he leans into atmospheres and silences, letting the audience interpret. The house — a moss-drenched, rambling Kolkata residence on the banks of the Ganga — is more than a location; it’s a living organism, soaked with past lives, griefs, and joys. You can almost hear its walls breathe.
But perhaps the most affecting achievement of Puratawn is how it gives memory a texture. Ravi Kiran Ayyagari’s cinematography, all soft hues and gentle light, evokes an autumnal warmth. Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s editing favours long takes and unhurried transitions, making time itself feel like a character — sometimes still, sometimes elusive.
The film resists neat closures; questions remain unanswered. Who was Mamoni before she became this woman half-lost to memory? Did her daughter ever truly know her? It’s for the audience to interpret.