Kapurush (1965) - film review

Amitabha Roy is a young screenwriter who is making a tour of rural India in search of inspiration for his next film.  When his car breaks down in a remote backwater, tea planter Bimal Gupta invites him to spend the night at his home.  With nowhere else to stay, Amitabha has no choice but to accept the kind offer.  He can hardly believe his eyes when he discovers that Gupta’s wife is Karuna, a girl he was once deeply in love with.  Gupta has no knowledge of this and Karuna gives no indication that she has ever met Amitabha, let alone harbours any sympathies for him.  But the young writer is still in love with Karuna and recalls with sorrow their former life together, when they were students at university in Calcutta.  One night during those carefree days, Karuna came to Amitabha and implored him to marry her so that she would not have to go away with her uncle.  As much as he loved Karuna, Amitabha was unable to commit himself to her.  He needed time to reflect, to plan for the future... And now he is alone and she is married to a crude and insensitive man.  Can it be too late for Amitabha to win back the heart of the one he loves...?

Kapurush (a.k.a. The Coward) is a low-key affair compared with the films that Satyajit Ray had made in the preceding decade, a simple tale of rekindled love involving just three protagonists in the classical triangular situation.  Yet, simple as the story is, Ray’s understated but masterful handling of it gives it a searing humanity which makes this one of his most poignant films.  In common with many of Ray’s films of this period, it also makes some wry observations on India’s caste system, although these are pretty tangential to the plot. 

Each of the three actors in this film will be familiar to devotees of Ray’s work.  Soumitra Chatterjee, the director’s most talented and loyal protégé, was introduced to us in the third instalment of his Apu Trilogy (1959), and subsequently starred alongside Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata (1964).   The fact that Haradhan Bannerjee played Mukherjee’s unscrupulous boss in Mahanagar (1963) brings a curious symmetry to the casting for this film.  These three are arguably the finest of Ray’s pool of acting talent and each gives a superb performance here.   Mukherjee is particularly effective in her subdued role, revealing the anguish of her character’s tortured existence with remarkable subtlety and heart-wrenching pathos.

Whilst Kapurush is not one of Ray’s better known films, and is overshadowed by the great films he made before and after it, it is a compelling and extremely moving piece of drama.  The calmness of the composition belies the emotional turmoil that rages beneath the surface, a storm which is only just revealed to us by the subtle gestures and facial expressions of the ill-fated lovers, Chatterjee and Mukherjee.  The final sequence at the railway station instantly calls to mind Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard’s parting in Brief Encounter (1945) and is no less heart-wrenching.  This is Satyajit Ray at his most delicate and compassionate.

© James Travers 2010

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