Berlinale ‘Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi)’ review: Tillotama Shome pulls punches to power this Bengali drama on mothers & Others

Poster and stills of Tillotama Shome in Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi).

The camera opens with a hand reaching out to catch a frog in the fields. The shot works as a foreshadowing. The frog might be you, moving around of your own free will, in your true nature, but the hand of fate will come for you to put you in a box. That hand can be your family, your society or even your own self. Sounds bleak? The frog also signals metamorphosis and rebirth. That opening sequence belongs to debutant directors Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi’s Bengali film Baksho Bondi (Shadowbox), which is competing in the newly introduced Perspectives segment of the 75th Berlinale, February 13-23, 2025. If there could be a word for the fragrance, a sweet blend of sweat and mustard oil, that emanates from cotton saree-wrapped exhausted mothers, this film is that.

Minutes later into the film, which is set in Barrackpore, India’s oldest cantonment, we see Maya (Tillotama Shome), the archetypal Bengali mother, putting rice to boil on stove, and goes to wake up her son Debu (Sayan Karmakar) and husband Sundar (Chandan Bisht). She arranges Sundar’s certificates in a bag and instructs Debu to take Sundar to the saloon for a clean-up and then to his uncle’s shop for a potential job interview before herself stepping out with her cycle for her day job. Later, diegetic sounds of quarrels pour into the house as Maya irons clothes — much like Alison from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) — a woman’s work is never done. Problems shadow Sundar and show up at Maya’s door.

Circumstances have predisposed a role reversal. Debu illustrates that child is the father of man — albeit unwilling — and unlike Wordsworthian joy, this child will experience sorrow and trauma in the future, like his parents. The go-getter provider-nurturer Maya cycles to work to keep the house running, while ironing the creases of her relationships. The prime mover of her universe and of Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi), this centre must hold lest things fall apart. Maya represents two facets of a mother — one tending her child (son/childlike husband) who’s turned his face away from her in Jamini Roy’s painting Santhal Mother and Child (1920), as well as the one rushing to work in Ramkinkar Baij’s sculpture Santhal Family (1938).

Mothering demands of her immense resilience, a steel grit. To others, she exemplifies the Bengali idiom bhangbe tobu mochkabe na (will break but won’t bend), but Maya is too proud to concede helplessness or accept defeat. There is no room to wallow in self-pity. She has no one to turn to: no friends; her own mother (Bhadra Basu) and brother (Somanth Mondal) repudiate her. She married outside of her community much to her family’s chagrin — the scandal could have been the reason for her father’s death but backstories are not told.

Directors Tanushree Das (left) and Saumyananda Sahi (right); poster of their debut feature film Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi), designed by Amrita Bagchi and Faraz Ali.

The absent father is a recurring trope. Maya’s own father is absent while her son’s father is unable to be present the way a father should, owing to his PTSD (disconcerted by a shaving knife on his face or a bullet shot sound in the distance), and earlier, perhaps, being physically away on Army posting. This trope follows from a short film cinematographer Sahi (Nasir, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Ghode ko jalebi khilane le ja riya hoon, Trial by Fire, All That Breathes, Shivamma, Black Warrant) and film-editor Das (Ningal Aranaye Kando?, Aise Hee, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Shankar’s Fairies) directed last year. A New Life, as part of MAMI Select: Filmed on iPhone, was mentored by Vikramaditya Motwane, who’s one of the 19 homegrown producers on Baksho Bondi. In A New Life, the father (played by an impactful Somanth Mondal) leaves his pregnant wife to go for a job hunt but is actually trying to escape from his reality of becoming a father.

ALSO READ: Vikramaditya Motwane: ‘I’m an enabler not disruptor, that’s Anurag; we are a very sensitive country’

At long last, the evocative, incandescent, versatile Tillotama Shome plays an age-appropriate role, a character written for her. Shome brings immense precision, gravitas and grace to Maya. She shows that there can be thairaav even in tempestuous anger. Chandan Bisht (of Fire in the Mountains fame) as Sundar is quite a revelation. What adds to the dexterity of the structure of the film is that Maya and Sundar are as much bound together as they are distant, opposing forces.

It is difficult to look at Maya and not be reminded of Lord Byron’s poem: “She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes;/Thus mellowed to that tender light/Which heaven to gaudy day denies.” For Shome, all of her life seems to have been in preparation for a role like this. For her, who owns every character she’s ever played, the socially marginalised Maya isn’t a new or different role on the face of it. She’s played a housemaid before, as the iconic Alice in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Ratna in Rohena Gera’s Sir (2018). That, however, also boxed her in one type of role being offered to her. Where Maya, a familiar character, in a familiar Bengali milieu, is different is in the writing of her. Das and Sahi proffer agency and choice, free will over fate, to Maya.

Tillotama Shome in a still from Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi).

She hustles, in addition to the physical and emotional labour of caregiving, which Shome brings from her own life to Maya — a captive of her choices and their consequences. Like in Mark Leigh’s Hard Truths (2024), Baksho Bondi approaches mental illness in intimate relationships with an emotional lens.

Maya’s face speaks of acute pain, suppressed joy, unspeakable exasperation, but also of unconditional love. In spite of the severity of her circumstances, she doesn’t devolve into abjectness.

It might seem like her solipsistic universe, but Maya has no alternative choice or support system besides this house, this family — and most of all — her bicycle. The cycle is more than a vehicle for Maya. It is her sakhi (friend), confidante, witness, powering agent, shield against hostile conversations, and her refuge. The cycle, given to women by the government, signifies movement, of time and history. Unlike men’s time, which is linear — departure, progression and arrival — women’s time is cyclical, circular, moves in loop. For Maya, the start point is her end point — her home. Like in Ritwik Ghatak’s films, Martin Heidegger’s reading of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones”, for Maya, too, homecoming is no simple return to one’s home. It evokes an implacable sense of stasis but it is also the familiar — and sole refuge — one returns to. Her teenaged son, Debu, can escape to the single-screen film theatre or drown in rap songs and dance to channel his frustrations, resentment and rebellion (the film is bookended by Bangladeshi and Assamese rap songs, respectively, handpicked by music composer Naren and Benedict; Naren Chandavarkar is also a co-producer). The mentally-spiralling Sundar can drink away his thwarted anger with a friend. But Maya, neither belligerent nor bitter, has to firefight and shadow-box not only what life throws her way but her own demons, too.

Like Ghentu (Sharmila Tagore) from Partha Pratim Chowdhury’s Chhaya Surya (1963), Shome’s Maya might have been wayward and free-willed when young, for she fell in love with and married beneath her, the Uttarakhandi armyman stationed in the suburban Barrackpore. Like the elder sister Chinu (Mamata Shankar) of Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin (1979), Maya is her family’s sole breadwinner. Like Nita’s (Supriya Choudhury) broken sandal which she tries to secure with a safety pin — in Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) — Maya is trying to hold in place her family and her life. Like the wife Arati in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), Maya eternalises the lower-middle-class working woman on screen. She’s mechanical and stoic but not heartless. Her eyes well up, but she’s quick to gulp down the tears. She has no time, even to fall sick. Like Shome’s sex worker from Manto (2018), Maya, too, is tired working clockwork, but we don’t see her sleep blissfully, the one time she dozes off in a chair waiting for Sundar, she wakes up with a sense of dread. Sundar has gone missing. Has the one who fears abandonment abandoned the nest or has something ominous happened?

Maya, Sundar, Debu, Maya’s mother, the police officer — every character in this film is boxed in, into an idea. But Maya brings her idiosyncrasies to the prototypical character of the mother. She makes seen the unseen industriousness of all mothers — and their physical and emotional labour. Maya’s is also an act of self-preservation. As the film progresses, Sahi, one of India’s finest young cinematographers, makes his camera go from mid-length shots (placing the individual as a fragment of the larger society) to big close-ups, to evoke angst and interiority.

Spaces — the three houses — tell the historical story of class struggle. Maya’s own small house is grey, cold, gloomy, cluttered, bestrewn with things and memories of another life. Her brother’s house has more space, light and colour. The house she works at is a typical upper-middle-class-could-be-rich bhadralok house.

Like in the end of Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961), the unification of the couple, of two warring theatre groups, stood for the utopian union of two Bengal, Maya and Sundar’s union against all odds and opposing forces stands for the union of a fragmented, insular world. There is an Othering of the transgressive Maya and outsider Sundar. But amid the bleak, the politics of hope, like in Ghatak’s films, accompanies Baksho Bondi.

The quiet feminism of this film speaks volumes. Ever wondered why Indian cinema has had Angry Young Men — from rage against the machine to melancholic brooding — as a genre in itself but not Angry Young Women, the historically, systemically oppressed lot? Shome — like most mothers, albeit in her own way — is rising up to “the tyranny of necessity”, to borrow a phrase from filmmaker Shaunak Sen, one of Shadowbox’s 19 co-producers. It’s commendable that homegrown co-creators as stakeholders are producing this indie. Such a model, if consistent in the future, can really give wings to the flailing Indian independent film.

In ex-armyman Sundar, the dissociation with authority, literally and metaphorically, signals a de-gendering of masculinity. Sundar bestows Maya with his fears and desires, loves and hatreds. But for all his displaced sense of reality and a love emanating from a need for care and protection, his sense of a punctured male ego and self-esteem is intact. In a powerful moment of confrontation, an incensed Maya, raring to shout at him, the way mothers scold delinquent children, she abates the wife’s wrath and lets the mother in her take sway, she asks Sundar whether he’s hungry. Even in moments of extreme exasperation, she chooses care for this mentally distressed man — the weaker one in the husband-wife power dynamics — who might have done something untoward. Both are boxed in in a small, dark room, their faces half-lit in natural light, the camera goes close, capturing their side profiles and eyes. Bisht is devastatingly superb as Sundar — the beautiful one — drawing us in, making us feel for him. That is undercut by the mysterious restraint of Shome’s Maya — is she the deluded one? Das and Sahi’s multiple-draft writing keeps the narrative from devolving into melodrama. But also keeps externalised drama at a remove, much like Maya, it is temperature-controlled. Maya pore jawa, in Bengali, also means the inexplicable pull (pichhu-taan) one feels for someone/something (a person, a pet, a thing) which becomes a habit — whether Sundar or her bicycle — both are her strength and her weakness.

A still from Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi).

Not only do Das and Sahi make the unseen lives visible, they also break the image of a tranquil suburban life in Bengali popular culture and show deeply scarred families of the working class. A family’s story can also be the story of a country, of memory sieving through history. A personal grief can reflect the sorrow of millions — of the displaced and homeless. From Haraprasad’s statement in Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961), “we are air-like (floating), unsupported” to Ghatak’s assertion that “Today, we are all refugees having lost our vital roots in life” describes Maya. Her cycling through life epitomises the Upashinadic dictum: choroibeti, choroibeti (constant movement), which Ghatak co-opts in his film to redeem the figure of the refugee/homeless by seeing ceaseless movement as the human condition. Maya walks a lonely road…on the boulevard of broken dreams. She, too, is a symbol for a temporally stuck but spatially on-the-move refugee. But, at the same time, a figurative captive herself, she wants to keep Sundar captive, too, in a baksho (box) of her making — her home. The frog-catcher, like the frogs he catches, will be sent into another box eventually. The recurring image of bars heighten the fact that incarceration is a state of mind.

With Sundar, the film alludes to the mental impact of being a soldier, an aspect seldom seen in Indian popular culture, which projects defence administration from the binaries of valour or atrocity. While the subplots may not always cohere, or feel a few drafts short of perfect, the main narrative plot with solid acting is impeccable and keeps you hooked with no dull moments. If more films like Das and Sahi’s Baksho Bondi can spotlight working-class stories of provincial Bengal, that is if these two continue to make films in Bengali, it will move the needle for contemporary Bengali cinema. The same holds true for Hindi cinema, if Bollywood bankrolls new directors and actors from outside of the industry.

First published on February 16, 2025.