Bengali film buffs constantly crib about how Bengali cinema needs a change and needs to break out. Well, Iti Mrinalini does just that. All one needs to do is go buy a ticket and maybe the cribbing will stop.

Iti Mrinalini is Aparna Sen the actor-director’s return to Bengali cinema after Paromitar Ekdin. The film transcends its regional mould and presents Bengalis as part of a bigger global existence. It breathes of a veteran who has the freshness of a debutante who gets immensely personal and goes all out to make that one good movie. This is a new-generation film which doesn’t need a hip youngster to make it contemporary.

Mrinalini, an ageing actress at the end of her career, resolves to end her life on her own terms, triggered by a moment when she realises that her lover and director friend has replaced her with a younger actress in his next film. She returns home broken and goes through an old trunk filled with memorabilia which acts as a portal to the past as she reflects back on her life and the various men who loved her and shaped her world.

Aparna Sen plays Mrinalini and Konkona Sensharma plays her younger self. The narrative weaves through memories of the men in Mrinalini’s life. Starting with Abhijit (Shaheb Bhattacherjee), a Naxalite in the Seventies, to the married filmmaker Siddhartha Sarkar (Rajat Kapoor), who fathers her love child Sohini, to the worldly-wise Booker-nominated south Indian writer Chintan Nair (Koushik Sen), who introduces her to a new understanding of love, to the yuppie ambitious director Imtiaz Chowdhury (Priyanshu Chatterjee), who woos her with a character to die for and a false promise of love.

One of the scenes that blew me away is where Sen takes a mundane ritual of a girl child’s head being shaved and gives it an ‘out-of-the-box’ diasporic touch, as Mrinalini playfully paints daughter Sohini’s bald head and turns it into a game of colours. And when the mother and daughter sit on the beach and sing a Tagore song, you see Mrinalini singing a song she feels emotionally connected to, you see her daughter brought up in Toronto just trying to learn the song and you see the filmmaker use the song to represent a state of mind, and the end result becomes as haunting as the one we experienced between the brother and the sister in Meghe Dhaka Tara.

The manner in which Sen has socio-political events of national stature as a backdrop to the tragedies of her characters is reminiscent of Yugant, where environmental destruction became the backdrop for a destructive, souring relationship.

Konkona excels, striking the right balance between a younger version of Mrinalini and a character in her own right, just as (Robert) De Niro had done when he played a young Don Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Koushik shines with maturity and poise. The older Sohini (Ananya Banerjee) reminds me of a young Dakota Fanning — funny and camera-free with real, cinematic presence. Priyanshu, unfortunately, fails to bring out the arrogance of a yuppie filmmaker coming out of NYU. Ranvir Shorey stands out in a cameo as a hot-headed cinematographer, adding his trademark comic flare. However, casting Rajat Kapoor seemed like a desperate Sen trying to bring back Deepu (Anjan Dutt) from Yugant but ended up settling for less.

As for Sen, it takes courage to cast oneself as an ageing actress who gets snubbed by the younger, fresher faces when one has been the reigning star for so many decades in reality. It takes balls to sketch out a character that is so brutal and yet so close to the grain that it exposes human vulnerability to the point of being uncomfortable. So I guess if I had to pick between the director and the actress, the director definitely would take the cake.

And a request to movie buffs who tend to give Bengali cinema a pass, please get over your post-colonial hangover, for a moment. Forget the Wong Kar-wais, (Quentin) Tarantinos and Guy Ritchies, and look into your backyard — you will find a treasure trove of filmmakers who may not have come home with an Academy Award but went all the way with cinema.

The generation of filmmakers that came up in the Seventies (to name a few: Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Goutam Ghose, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Utpalendu Chakraborty, M.S. Sathyu, Aparna Sen) — they really pushed the boundaries and made movies for the sake of making movies and nothing else. That thought process has slowed down and Iti Mrinalini is like a wake-up call for the film fraternity that if these kinds of films and filmmakers are not embraced and supported, the world of serious cinema is going to become an endangered species.

THE FRIDAY EVENING PREMIERE OF ITI MRINALINI AT PRIYA CINEMA...