IFFI 2024 | Bhootpori review: Jaya Ahsan makes for a sparkling ghost in Soukarya Ghosal’s fairy tale

Jaya Ahsan (right) in a still from the Bengali film Bhootpori.

A newlywed girl, who’s just stepped into her teens, wakes up before the sun rises, to go fill water from the handpump in the courtyard of her still-alien house. She looks up to see an older married woman in a laal paar’er saari. The moonlight shines and the veil lifts to reveal the chin of a skeleton. The 13-year-old faints. This girl was my thamma (paternal grandmother), whose husband, my thakurda, would sleepwalk on another night, drawn by the voice of a nishi bhoot calling his name.

Bengali children are fed on a regular diet of bhooter golpo (ghost stories). My now-deceased thamma kept that tradition going in our household. And we’d listen awestruck.

There are myriad ghosts in the Bengali lexicon and literature. And in that galaxy, there is a range of female ghosts. Petni (virgin/unmarried girl/widow’s ghost), shakchunni (married female’s ghost), daini (witch who lives in the forest, could be benevolent), mechho bhoot (who accosts fishermen), pishachini (bloodthirsty/flesh-eating shapeshifters seen at graveyards), among others. What makes the Bengali ghost stand apart is that, unlike its Western counterpart, it is not unidimensional. It isn’t a singular projection of an evil, fearsome monstrosity. It is as diverse as a human being and looks and speaks like one of us. And, often, the Bengali bhoot is a comic one. From the stories by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Leela Majumdar, Bengali literature has tinkled with the benevolent ghost characters and the most hilarious encounters in strange and mysterious circumstances.

It is to Bandyopadhyay and Mukhopadhyay that filmmaker Soukarya Ghosal pays an ode to with his Bengali film Bhootpori, which screened at the 55th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) this week. Ghosal had earlier adapted Majumdar’s Podi Pishir Bormi Baksho into his strikingly original script of the food fantasy Rainbow Jelly (2018), which celebrates the innocence of a child with disability, played by real-life disabled child Mahabrata Basu, and his dreams in the face of adversity.

With Bhootpori, Ghosal is also riding the tide of horror comedy genre that’s salvaging Bollywood at present. And Bangladeshi actress Jaya Ahsan, as the likable, entertaining female ghost Banalata, is apt casting. She joins the league of the memorable Moushumi Chatterjee’s cocky dead aunt-in-law Pishima Rasomoyi in Aparna Sen-directed Goynar Baksho (2013; adapted from Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s story) and Swastika Mukherjee’s Kadalibala Dasi, ghost of an actress, in Anik Dutta-directed Bhooter Bhabishyat (2012).

In Bhootpori, at the deserted temple Durgabari, shrouded in a jungle, where lies buried a bloodied past, lives a female ghost, almost like forest goddess Bonbibi but feared by the locals. She won’t harm unless she visits the person in his dream. This Banalata is akin to Jibanananda Das’s poem Only darkness remains, as I sit there face to face with Banalata Sen/ her hair is like the dark nights of the long-lost Bidisha/ her face is like the fine carvings of Srabasti/… but she isn’t like those ghostesses who lure men with their beauty to kill them even though this Banalata has reasons to seek revenge.

Jaya Ahsan in stills from 'Bhootpori'.

Banalata also isn’t a medium for demonic possession (The Exorcist, 1973) or to conceive a demon-child (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968). She’s the ghost of a faultless, childless widow.

Surjo (sun in Bengali), a gallant prepubescent boy who, much to his mother’s trepidation, walks in his sleep at night, while playing a violin, an instrument he has never learnt how to pluck. His petrified mother Shilalipi (Sudipta Chakraborty), who catches hold of him before he could jump off the terrace, on the doctor’s prescription, takes her family away from the city to her ancestral village house, hoping the change of air would do her son — and her — some good.

The desolate house belongs to Surjo’s (Bishantak Mukherjee) maternal great-great-grandfather Kalo Thakur (Santilal Mukherjee), once a much revered tantrik saadhak/yogi (seeker) who indulged in child sacrifice. The house conceals many a secret and passageway. The dilapidated Durgabari in the haunted forest, where stay ghosts, is where one must not tread into. And that is exactly where the precocious Surjo will go gallivanting, and come face to face with — even be the only one who is able to touch — Banalata, who hasn’t slept in 70 years and yearns to sleep for her ultimate release from the corporeal world, into becoming a fairy. It is in the forest, in a secret underground tunnel, that Surjo meets Makhan Chor, a generational housebreaker, essayed by the gifted Ritwick Chakraborty. Makhon Chor — sketched quite like Kalo Master from Leela Majumdar’s Tongling (a serialised novel published in Sandesh in 1961, Satyajit Ray’s family-run children’s magazine) — will become Surjo’s guide in solving an age-old mystery encoded in musical notes. Surjo, the sun and light, meets creatures of the dark: the ghost and the underground thief, both benevolent and comic, both social outcastes.

We are given Banalata’s backstory. She was a Brahmin’s daughter, widowed at a young age, and killed before she was to be remarried. Cries of little girls used to haunt her. The film feels like a sweet, wholesome family entertainer and keeps you engaged and joining the dots, without any plot complications.

M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) to Niall Johnson’s The Ghost of Greville Lodge (2000), a young boy visited by ghosts is a trope filmed many times over. Ghosal brings that basic plot and gives it a rural Bengal flavour. Like in Rainbow Jelly, in this film too, Ghosal has introduced a child who can act, albeit one who needs to think on his feet and who’s now innocent now cheeky and precocious.

Not only does Bhootpori — and the female ghost in the aforementioned Bengali films — subvert the Western trope (religious) of a demonic spirit that needs to be exorcised as well as the Eastern trope (social) of a wronged and revenge-seeking ghost, from the likes of Ringu in Japanese horror and Pontianak in Malay horror, Ghosal’s film hints at the possibility of ghosts being scared of humans.

Invoking the comic — with the female spirit/ghost — is a great way of talking, even tangentially, about social mores which make a woman’s very existence in patriarchal societies horrific, stemming from fear. Ghosal puts things in his films to question them in a way they don’t feel forced. Ghosal upends the trope of female ghosts shown in Bengali films previously as someone who hankers for or guards her streedhan (gold jewellery and precious jewels), because gold wields power for these otherwise subjugated women. Unlike in Goynar Baksho and Satyajit Ray’s sole horror film, Monihara/The Lost Jewels (from the anthology Teen Kanya, 1961, and adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s short story), Banalata considers the gold jewellery she’s wearing as shackles and noose keeping her trapped.

Ghosal makes Banalata and other characters utter real-world social malaise such as Sati (practice of widow immolation on husband’s pyre), female infanticide and untouchability (signalling caste oppression) — but utterances or statements signal an end, a finality whereas a visual image could have kindled many possibilities. Since Banalata, a Brahmin’s widowed daughter, is not shown as having interacted with or observed any low-caste woman in the duration of the film, her experiential realisation of what “untouchability” can feel like (nobody except Surjo can touch her) a tad bolt from the blue but still ingenious.

Bhootpori, with minimalist folksy music by Nabarun Bose, adroit cinematography by Aalok Maiti and tight editing by Arghyakamal Mitra, rides on nostalgia. The modern-day fairy tale is a hat tip to the kind of cinema of yore when light-hearted horror films married fantasy and mystery. Devoid of jump scares and heebie-jeebies, Bhootpori unfolds more as a thriller than atypical horror. The setting and the build up keep the story engaging and, yet, the climax feels a bit flat for all that world-building, and especially to the reader/viewer of mystery novels/films. Plot twist, red herrings and a surprising climax — to stay ahead of the audience’s guessing game — would have been cherry on the cake.

If Rainbow Jelly was ingenious, Bhootpori is nostalgic. Ghosal holds the torch of children's stories in contemporary Bengali cinema. Ghosal swims in steering clear of Bengal’s penchant for straight-off literary adaptions into films even as his inspirations come from the Bengali literary world (comic fairy/ghost trope). To quote French poet-playwright Jean Cocteau, “Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.” This, then, is Ghosal’s style.