Last week, a Moscow audience again watched an emotional Suchitra Sen tear Soumitra Chatterjee’s panjabi while calling him a liar and a despicable man.
Saat Pake Bandha had returned to the Moscow International Film Festival 63 years after it won Sen the Best Actress Award at an earlier edition.
The people closely associated with the film — directed by Ajoy Kar who also made Harano Sur, Saptapadi and Parineeta — are no longer around.
“I was not born when the film was made,” Paulomi Basu, daughter of Chatterjee, said. “But when I grew up, Bapi took me to watch it. I remember him saying, ‘This movie is much ahead of its time’.”
At the third Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 — the year of the R.D. Bansal Productions film’s release — the Grand Prix went to Federico Fellini and the Best Actor Award to Steve McQueen for The Great Escape.
Apart from Sen’s award, the film festival had a second Bengal connection: Satyajit Ray was a member of the jury.
“This award was very dear to my mother. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award came too late, but this award came when she was at the peak of her popularity,” Sen’s daughter and actor Moon Moon Sen said.
“Saat Pake Bandha highlights how ego and external pressure can ruin a marriage.”
Nikhilesh Giri, deputy chief of mission at the Indian embassy in Moscow, said: “I understand it had been liked a lot in Russia when it was released. And it felt great to see that even today, it evokes strong emotions.”
Varsha Bansal, granddaughter of R.D. Bansal, was in Moscow for the occasion. She told the audience: “This film is proof that we can create a future from our past.”
Later, over a phone call, she explained the back-story to The Telegraph.
“The original negatives of the film were lost in a major fire at Henderson’s Film Laboratories in South Norwood, London. So the film was restored from the positives,” she said.
It took months to restore the film from a 35mm print under the National Film Development Corporation-National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI). State-of-the-art ARRI digital scanners were used to convert the analogue into a digital medium.
“The whole cinema was restored frame by frame. We removed dirt and emulsion, and corrected noise, pops and clicks,” an NFDC-NFAI official said.
“While doing all this, the main concern was to retain the original visual and aural quality. Restoring this film took several months.”
“And yet, I think we could achieve only 80 per cent of our target,” Varsha said. “But the screening is quite significant. We are bringing back a lost film onto the screens once again for a new generation of film lovers.”
Nina Kochelyaeva, a member of the selection committee of the Moscow International Film Festival who is responsible for the Asian-Pacific region, said Kar and Sen are well known to Russian audiences.
“The return of this classic film to a wider audience is of paramount importance for preserving the historical continuity of Bengali cinema and strengthening friendly ties between Russia and India in the film industry,” she said.
It was Kochelyaeva who introduced the film at the Moscow festival.
Film historian Maxim Pavlov, who was at the screening, said: “In the 1970s and 1980s, I used to watch Indian cinema. I have watched Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. Very recently, I saw half-a-dozen Ray films screened in and around Russia.
“These are timeless classics; my generation does not know about this film, and that is where their importance lies. This film is in the same tradition as films about the crisis of the traditional family as films by Satyajit Ray, Yasujiro Ozu and Ingmar Bergman.”
A faraway film festival is as good an excuse as any to watch this film, be reminded of a bygone world, and marvel at the way Kar handled an enduring theme like marital discord. It is also a reminder of the creativity that once marked the Bengali film industry.
