Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Mayanagar (Once Upon a Time in Calcutta) is an elegy, a lament, and a love letter rolled into one. From its opening moments, marked by death, to its melancholic conclusion, also bookended by death, the film captures a city and its people, trapped in the throes of relentless change.
Mayanagar, which premiered in the Orizzonti section at the 78th Venice Film Festival in 2021, builds on Aditya Vikram’s penchant for poetic realism but marks a shift in his storytelling style. Unlike the nearly silent Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) or the dreamlike Jonaki, this is a film rooted in a solid narrative with relatable characters. Yet, it is also lyrical, evocative and immersive.
The story follows Ela (Sreelekha Mitra), a former actress mourning the loss of her young daughter while trying to carve out a new life for herself. Her husband, Shishir (Satrajit Sarkar), inhabits an adjacent room in the same house but remains emotionally distant. There is also Bubu (Bratya Basu), Ela’s stepbrother, a reclusive theatre owner clinging to the ruins of his once-thriving theatre. These two siblings — one seeking to move forward, the other steeped in the past — become metaphors for a city caught between nostalgia and change.
Surrounding them is an ensemble of fascinating figures: Raja (Shayak Roy), a young man who becomes the agent for a dubious chit fund company owned by Pradipto Pal (Anirban Chakrabarti), hoping to make it big one day. His girlfriend Pinky (Reetika Nondini Shimu) is a beautician with her own struggles. Bhaskar (Arindam Ghosh), Ela’s former lover, heads the team of engineers building a new flyover in the city.
Aditya Vikram populates his film with striking symbols of a city in a flux: an under-construction flyover, an oversized dinosaur statue past its prime, numerous busts of Rabindranath Tagore whose presence in the city is reduced to remixes that strip his compositions of their original soul. The film’s soundscape, too, echoes this sense of displacement — the cacophony of urban life, the intrusion of modernity upon tradition.
Cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki captures Kolkata not as a mere backdrop but as a living, breathing entity. The attention to detail elevates the storytelling. A mosquito fogger transforms a narrow alley into a dreamlike setting. In another moment, a character’s hair spills over the bed, smoke curling around it — not the intoxicating fragrance of incense but the curling tendrils of a mosquito coil.
Sreelekha Mitra is riveting as Ela; she brings a quiet dignity to a woman who often feels at odds with the world around her. Whether drowning her sorrows in a glass of rum or carefully maintaining her appearance — her manicured nails and face masks hinting at an act of self-preservation rather than vanity — Ela is a fighter.
Bratya Basu is a standout as Bubu, whose silent despair is writ large on his face. Shayak Roy also commands attention as Raja.
