The Bengali cinema is the exact opposite of Bollywood. It is not bright, loud, musical and colourful.  It has the tradition of one of the nation’s most celebrated film-makers, Satyajit Ray.  Prolific director, Dasgupta, was a disciple of Ray but takes the tradition into a combination of the realistic and the mystical.  There is a great dignity and beauty in the seriousness of many of the Bengali films.

Memories in the Mist turns out to be a ghost story, not in the sense of eerie spookiness.  Rather, the ghost, one might say the haunted spirit of a father who is restless until he is reconciled with his widow and son, enters into the real world, interacts with his family in a naturalistic way (and all is filmed as if it were all real).  The effect of this is profoundly moving.

The father, who had long since been left by wife and son because of his affair with an actress, narrates the story, tells us about his son and his wife.  He is able to be with his long-suffering wife who realises that she acted too hastily and judgmentally in leaving him. He is able to meet his son and be delighted in the son’s willingness to forgive.

In the meantime, the son, a very good and kind man, is being spurned by his own ambitious wife who finds a career in writing (and breaking the Guinness Book of Records) American travel guides in Bengali.  She also has her own secrets and burdens her husband with them.  But, he has been strengthened in his quiet expectations of himself by his encounter with his father and looks to the future with the two children in hope and love.

A troupe of wandering actors recur during the film bringing song, dance and the tones of Hindu religious mythology.  An old flute-playing man and his associate also recur at key times during the man’s childhood and his present crises.  These give the film the mystical tone while the ghost (whose themes of repentance and reconciliation are spiritual) enters into the real world.

A fine and moving example of West Indian film-making.

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