“It’s solilo-quee and don’t you dare say anything about Shakespeare”

The Last Lear asks a question that is interesting though not entirely original: Are films the death of theatre, or perhaps, in a slightly less dramatic fashion: Is it possible to translate our centuries-old notions of acting and performance if the grammar of the medium changes drastically? “Be your tears wet?” asks King Lear of Cordelia. If cinema weeps, are those tears real?
Harish “call me Harry” Mishra is concerned, when offered to do a film, if he will be up to the task. He is worried that he will be of no use if his body is not completely presented to the audience. All these close-ups and zooms, where are the good old days when he would strut on to the stage and shout Shakespeare in a melancholic rage? For melancholic rage is the only emotion Harish Mishra, obviously and explicably Bengali, seems to be capable of. In one of his most benign and finally-at-ease-with-the-world plays, Shakespeare wrote Prospero as a character who is, no doubt, bitter about being cast off his kingdom with a child, but also wise enough, after no less than twelve years of introspection, that the path of revenge leads to the grave. His project was not a bloody revenge, but forgiveness- by which he wished to be free from the bands of bitterness and the sour wish for vengeance; things even an ISC-inflicted student can understand. However, call-me-Harry performs him with a vengeance. When a talented, off-beat filmmaker (read: chain-smoking, long haired man behind dark glasses) comes to Harry with a film, he gets up and does Prospero’s most benign and heart-warming speech “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes…”- a speech meant to be the beginning of his act of forgiveness- with a thunderous vengeance that would make even Lear wither.
But, let’s not split hairs.
Rituparno Ghosh has been making the kind of films which inspired an entire generation of young people like myself to think of a Bangla cinema after Satyajit Ray. Right from his second film, let’s leave originality of plot for the moment, he has scripted a brilliant alternative cinema that showed us how films could happen inside the decaying households of Kolkata. His conflicts were made exciting by the very banality of his settings. A celebrity dancer and mother talks to her daughter about the void left in their lives after the death of her husband on the 19th of April many years ago. The emotions are raw and unrelenting in their crunch. The entire episode is conducted within a single day and the film ends with a new morning, with new hopes ahead as the daughter receives a ‘phone call from her would-be fiancé. One can seldom think of a drama in a modern context that could be more Shakespearean than this, the plot of Unishe April. Utsav, probably my favourite Ghosh film, centers around a bonedi bari Durga Puja where emotions run high as the young wife is faced with a failing marriage- to the sound of the dhunuchi dance in the background. In Bariwali, as the eponymous character, played by Kirron Kher, wallows in a nostalgia that is at one with the decadent mansion she lives in, her life is suddenly upset by the arrival of a film crew out to shoot indoors for a film based on Tagore’s Chokher Bali headed by the brooding and enigmatic director played by Chiranjeet. Similar motifs? Yes, but not quite, unfortunately.
As The Last Lear unfolds, one wonders what to make of Harry- forced on to a pedestal by application to the daily-rigors necessary to do so. He is puzzling, eccentric, quotes Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, wears designer spectacles and calls a fellow-stage actor whose death is supposed to elicit a homage from him, a ‘her’ or ‘a bloody homosexual’. The point is made. He is a stage-addict who gave up his chance of a lifetime to play King Lear as he walked out of theatre due to a slur. He doesn’t understand acting for films (“what’s a show reel, what is DoP?” he asks) and has his inhibitions. Our talented man, however, convinces him otherwise with the help of a guess-what-that-guy’s-life-is-like game and CCTV camera. I’m not sure about the CCTV camera, but isn’t the former supposed to make some sense to a stage-veteran? Anyway, as the plot for the ‘film’ within the film unfolds (It’s called The Mask, dubious or nail-bitingly embarrassing- you decide) he is playing the character of a clown (symbolism alert) who, facing the death of his art, kills another person and is on the run. He goes to the hills and somehow becomes intrinsic to another sub-plot concerning the breakdown of a marriage between the characters played by Preity Zinta and Prosenjit (who the hell was dubbing for him?). Shabnam (Preity) has her own problems off-screen. She is taught by Harry to scream at the hills (he screams Shakespeare) and she breaks down after that. She passes on her good-advice at relationships later to Harry’s night-nurse Ivy. Ghosh seldom moves away from strict notions of unity of time and sometimes, even place (Unishe April, Raincoat). Real time in The Last Lear is concentrated on two simultaneous events: The premiere of The Mask at a Diwali weekend and Shabnam’s visit to the dying thespian’s house. The story of the shooting and what preceded it is told in flashbacks. Interesting, though not unfamiliar. Narratives don’t have to travel through unending measures of space and time, it could unfold in your backyard: Ghosh’s trademark as I mentioned earlier. It is revealed slowly how Harry pushes himself- a theatrical idiom- to perform even the climax-scene where he is expected to jump off a cliff as his director commands(this is not my metaphor)- a filmic idiom. He is loath to let a stuntman handle this scene. As his theatrical instinct burns him up, helped by a lot of alcohol, he requests the talented director to let him do the scene himself and signs an undertaking. A few seconds ago, he was told by the talented director: “You are drunk. You are completely sloshed”. Legal loop, anyone? The talented director has a thing for realism in his cinema so he wants the jump to look authentic- what this means is that by the end of it all- Harry is left for dead as the filmmakers reject him after the production.
My nitpicking may seem awkward and exaggerated. But these are the small things that would frustrate any discerning person. There is a constant hammering of Shakespeare to prove Harry’s worth although I’ve seen several films that are more Shakespearean without having a single word uttered from his plays. Utpal Dutt (the writer of Aajker Shahjahan) could invoke Shakespeare in the very way he conducted himself in films like Agantuk. Naipaul commented how Shatranj Ke Khiladi is almost Shakespearean in its economy and precision of dialogue and expression. And these are films that had nothing to do with Shakespeare. So, for a film that posits Shakespeare at the very front of its activities- it is definitely frustrating to see him flung about the room like left-over brandy. But I suppose, for an actor of Amitabh Bachchan’s caliber- whose melodramatic excess extends to shouting like a maniac to a small deaf-and-dumb girl in his most celebrated film in modern times- one can hardly expect a different approach to Shakespeare, perhaps, in his thesaurus, a synonym for high-melodrama, a synonym for looking around wildly as if suddenly struck blind, a synonym for shouting but ultimately, bad acting. However, I’m not saying we should go Julian Beck-avant-garde on Shakespeare and reduce him to murmurs in smoky cafes. Even if he has to exist as a metaphor for theatre at large- the dying theatre in this case- he should not have been presented as he is in this film- difficult, unapproachable and elite. Because Shakespeare isn’t and was never meant to be. In The Last Lear, instead of taking Shakespeare to be a simple symbol of theatre he is presented as an elite obscurantist inaccessible to everyone from the journalist to the actress. Except for the talented director of course, who appreciates Shakespeare but is forced to shout, during shooting, at the errant Harry that this is not bloody Shakespeare. What comes as a surprise is Shefali Shah’s inspired turn as Harry’s partner (or wife? Am not sure). Although the dialogues are childish at times and lagging in the emotional crunch Ghosh is capable of in Bengali (like Dosar, most recently), she shines in depicting her character who, interestingly, doesn’t travel outside the space of Harry’s home in the film and recreates, ironically, Harry’s character as something more attractive than even Mr. Bachchan could in all his screen-time. It gets overtly melodramatic in the end, but somehow I felt it was nearer to Ghosh’s terrain and wasn’t very put off by it. It was all managed by Shefali Shah and a few inspired shots towards the end.
A stronger script next time and Ghosh could consider not caring about commercial impulses like adopting a language for the mere sake of a wider audience. Don’t we have sub-titles for that? Everyone knows that a film like The Last Lear is not intended for everybody (a sad, but true presumption)- so really, a bag of contradictions is what The Last Lear stands out to be. King Lear is an intensely personal tragedy of a man unable to judge his closest relations. A weeping (and imprisoned) Cordelia is comforted

“We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales…”

Hardly the image of a man grunting about solilo-quee and hiding behind a fortress of vainglorious declamations and CCTV cameras.