Under the Skin: On Madhuja Mukherjee’s Deep6

Madhuja Mukherjee is a trans-media artist, film historian and artistic director of an experimental technology and media arts festival, TENT Little Cinema International Festival in Kolkata. Her previous body-of-work in film include experimental narratives like Carnival (2012), where the urban landscape of Kolkata is heightened using poetic license to extract pure sounds, images and sensations of carnivalesque suspension that grips the city during the autumn festival of Durga Puja. On the other hand, in Deep6—once again made in collaboration with the well-known commercial and art-house cinematographer, Avik Mukhopadhyay—a more linear narrative has been adopted, which nonetheless strains under the weight of heavy historical hauntings, all of which visit its protagonist Mitul, played by Tillotama Shome.

Mitul’s narrative begins with her grandmother’s death, an event that elicits no clear emotional response from her. Before she can arrive at a summation of her feelings, however, the grandmother arrives to occupy the same place she did when she was alive: in front of the television at Mitul’s home. Sitting next to her on the bed, she belts out Pannalal Bhattacharya’s languid song of unfulfilled desire “Amar Shaadh Na Mitilo” (My desires remain wanting). Another presence that haunts her is another complex amalgam of memory and desire: her ex-boyfriend, played by Chandan Roy Sanyal. As a former Leftist dada of the college campus, his revolutionary years are clearly behind him (as is his appeal as a generic, intellectual masculine type)—he slaves away at a menial proof-reader’s job in a small town outside Kolkata. Part of an intricate link of small magazine writers and editors, the obsolescence of a certain kind of cultural activity is highlighted by his descent into oblivion as well. One of his editors is played by Soumitra Chatterjee, the veteran actor in one of his last roles, who was also a former editor (with Nirmalya Acharya) of the little magazine Ekkhon (Now). In fact, Mitul’s East Bengali heritage makes her a speaker of the most easily recognisable language of exile within Bengali culture, a macrocosm wherein she finds herself in a microcosm of often being surreally estranged from the life of her own city. She is unable to relinquish these layered pasts and move on into the world of new opportunities, through her work at a news organisation, or her prospective love interest in the mildly-objectionable Muslim colleague Atish, played by Sumeet Thakur.

Even though Mitul is frozen in time, the camera remains dynamic and mindful of every sound or gesture that may potentially enter the frame of her world. Sometimes the porous nature of the frame can appear intentionally exaggerated for effect. Whenever Mitul is in office, akin to a ticker running along the bottom of the TV news screen, we hear a running stream of news commentary delivered by some of her colleagues—speculating on world political events like 9/11, the capture of Osama Bin Laden and his subsequent “deep6-ing”, as well as the climate crisis. This attempt to infuse aural, oral and video narratives with each other to create a more fluid template for the central protagonists’ palimpsest-like mindscape, resembles at-large the chaotic but layered structure of life in the film-version of Kolkata. Hence, the critique offered by the filmmaker is abstract and attuned to sensory changes in the landscape.

Varying political narratives are grafted on top of the other, each absorbing an essential spirit of the abstract community of the former’s receding vital reserves. What once animated and organised the people, mobilised them through a certain set of political masquerades, is subsequently given up to don other masks. In all this, despite employing the conventional narrative of a soul-searching protagonist, Mukherjee brings to the film her close awareness of formal details, rendering it a rich multimedia experience for the viewer.

All stills from the film Deep6 (2022) by Madhuja Mukherjee. Images courtesy the director.

To read more about films with mixed and unusual narrative forms, please click here, here and here.