Palan (2023) [Hall-Print]

Kaushik Ganguly will bring the story of dismissal in his new film ‘Palan’ in the context of 2022. The characters of Kharij will remain the same, the names will not change. The story will change a bit to keep pace with the context of this era.

Palan is billed as a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij (1982), which won the jury prize at the Cannes film festival in 1983, one of a handful of Indian films to ever compete in the main competition section for the Palme D’Or. A project of homage to Sen’s centenary year (2023), the events in Kaushik Ganguly’s sequel take place 40 years after the original, where a “servant boy” died in an upper middle class Bhadralok household comprising a husband and wife who both worked and a child only a bit younger than the domestic worker. In Palan, the Bhadralok child is a married adult (Jisshu Sengupta) and the working couple are retired and rotting in a Kolkata house that is literally falling apart. Sen underlines this by calling the couple, played by the actors Anjan Dutt and Mamata Shankar, by their real names on screen — Anjan and Mamata. Their family name? Sen. In an unusual cold wave, on the coldest day of the year, Manata and Anjan wake up with a plan to take their son to the zoo and find that their “servant boy” Palan has died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the windowless kitchen. But why was he not sleeping in his designated sleeping space–under the staircase of the house — each of the couple asks separately. “He was cold,” the landlord’s “servant boy” Hari answers. He also sleeps under the stairway. Through the film, we often see Hari staring silently as the events unfold, his presence like the ghost of Palan. Here is another boy who lives the same life as Palan. Whose face speaks that he knows it could so easily have been him in Palan’s place. Kharij uses silence superbly — segments of the film have zero background music, forcing us to confront what we are seeing on screen.