15 Park Avenue
Aparna Sen
India. 2005. 124 min
Cast : Shabana Azmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Soumitra Chatterjee, Waheeda Rehman
Introduction
There is an address in Aparna Sen's 15 Park Avenue (2005) that does not exist. No house stands at that corner of Kolkata. For Mitali, called Meethi, it is the most real place in the world, a house with a husband and five children in it whose voices she can almost hear. Sen takes this impossible household and declines to treat it as a delusion requiring correction. It is a second reality, running alongside the first and answerable to nobody. What follows is one of the least sentimental treatments of mental illness in Indian cinema, and one of the strangest.
The film opened in London on 27 October 2005 and in India on 6 January 2006, and took the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English at the 53rd ceremony. By then Sen had spent more than two decades working the Bengali art film into a largely English-language, pan-Indian idiom. 15 Park Avenue belongs to that mature phase. Its subject is schizophrenia, handled with clinical care, but the question it presses is older and larger: what authority does one version of the world hold over another, and what violence is done in enforcing it. The film asks whether the love owed to a suffering person might finally require letting her keep the world she has built.
Cast
- Konkona Sen Sharma - Meethi
- Shabana Azmi - Anjali
- Soumitra Chatterjee - Meethi's father
- Waheeda Rehman - Meethi's mother
- Rahul Bose - Joydeep
- Dhritman Chatterjee - Dr. Barua
- Kanwaljit Singh - Anjali's boyfriend
- Shefali Shah - Lakshmi
- Dipavali Mehta - Child Meethi
Crew
- Direction - Aparna Sen
- Story - Aparna Sen
- Cinematography - Hemant Chaturvedi
- Editing - Rabiranjan Maitra
- Production - Bipin Vohra
Background and Production
By the early 2000s Aparna Sen was the foremost woman director in the Indian art cinema, with 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981), Sati (1989) and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002) behind her. 15 Park Avenue continued a working method she had refined across those films. English is the principal language, a choice tied both to the educated, cosmopolitan milieu she kept returning to and to a practical calculation about audiences outside Bengal. Sen wrote and directed. Bipin Vohra produced. The cast drew on the parallel cinema and the commercial mainstream at once, which had long been Sen's habit.
Shabana Azmi, of the parallel cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, plays Anjali, the elder sister and reluctant guardian. Konkona Sen Sharma, Sen's daughter, who had won the National Film Award for Best Actress under her mother's direction in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, took the central and most demanding role of Meethi. Soumitra Chatterjee, whose name is inseparable from the cinema of Satyajit Ray, and Waheeda Rehman, of the Hindi cinema's golden age, play the parental generation. Rahul Bose is Joydeep, the former fiance. Dhritiman Chatterjee is the psychiatrist Dr Kunal Barua, and Shefali Shah has a sharply observed supporting part. Hemant Chaturvedi shot the film and Rabiranjan Maitra cut it, to 124 minutes. Most of it was made in the rooms of an old Kolkata household, with a section shot in Bhutan.
Story
Meethi is a woman in her thirties living with schizophrenia, cared for by her divorced elder sister Anjali, a university professor, and by their ageing mother. She never married. She lives nonetheless inside an arrangement in which she is the wife of her former fiance Joydeep and the mother of five children, all of them at 15 Park Avenue. Anjali's conversations with the new physician Dr Barua supply the history. Meethi had carried dormant traits from childhood but worked as a journalist into her early twenties, capable and ordinary, until a gang rape encountered in the course of her reporting drove her out of the shared world. Joydeep broke the engagement. On Barua's advice the family travels to Bhutan, where they meet Joydeep by chance, now married with children of his own. Meethi does not recognise him as the husband of her imagination. She befriends him, and he, learning what has happened, sets out to help her find the house. At the end she is guided to a corner of the city, finds the impossible address, walks in to the family waiting for her, and is not seen again.
Sen does not present Meethi's world as symptom alone. She gives it a coherence and a warmth that the world outside it, with its broken engagement and its exhausted carers, conspicuously lacks. The film questions the authority by which sanity claims a monopoly on truth, and asks what is gained when a person is made to give up the only happiness available to her. Duty against freedom is the second axis, carried by Anjali, whose devotion to her sister has quietly eaten her romantic and professional life. She is a university professor with a career that has stalled where the caring began, and the film registers the cost without turning her into a martyr. The stigma attached to mental illness, the long damage of sexual violence and the men who leave when things become difficult all sit underneath. Meethi is a person, not a saint and not a case study.
Direction and Craftsmanship
Sen withholds the usual cues of the illness film. There are no expressionist distortions to mark Meethi's perception, no hallucination sequences staged for the spectator's benefit, no score arriving to tell the audience that a mind has slipped. Hemant Chaturvedi's camera keeps to a measured naturalism, watching faces and rooms with the same patience whether the reality on screen is Meethi's or her family's. That equanimity is the argument. A film that lit Meethi's world differently would have settled the question in its first reel. By refusing to make the imagined look aberrant, Sen removes the comfortable distance from which madness is usually watched, and the audience is left doing the same work Anjali does, listening to a description of a house and having no way to test it. The structure moves from Anjali's expository scenes with Dr Barua out into the Bhutan interlude, and the contrast is between enclosure and openness, the tight Kolkata household set against mountain vistas that seem for a while to promise release.
Konkona Sen Sharma's Meethi works by restraint and sudden fracture, moving between lucidity and reverie without the broad gestures that disfigure most screen portrayals of psychiatric distress. She plays the alternate family as ordinary rather than rapturous, which is the harder choice and the more disturbing one. The Bengal Film Journalists' Association gave her its award for Most Outstanding Performance of the Year. Shabana Azmi gives Anjali a brittle, depleted dignity, letting the exhaustion and the suppressed longing register in very small inflections; the character is written as a woman who has stopped expecting anything, and Azmi plays her that way without appealing for sympathy. Soumitra Chatterjee and Waheeda Rehman supply a weathered authority that puts a history behind the family. Rahul Bose has the least grateful part in the film, a man who left and must now be decent about it, and he keeps Joydeep's discomfort visible without excusing him. Rabiranjan Maitra's cutting holds an unhurried rhythm throughout. The boldest decision in the film is the handling of the last sequence: the camera allows Meethi her reunion and does not mark it as fantasy, which leaves the audience to settle what has happened.
The Cinema of Aparna Sen
Sen's films have been preoccupied from the beginning with women who sit at an angle to the orders containing them. The lonely Anglo-Indian schoolteacher of 36 Chowringhee Lane, the mute and superstition-bound widow of Sati, the Tamil Brahmin housewife thrown into communal violence in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer: female interiority under pressure, and the gap between what a woman feels and what her world will let her be. Meethi belongs to that line. Her retreat into an invented domesticity is the extreme form of a longing for wholeness that the patriarchal and bourgeois structures around her cannot supply. The costs of female duty and the fragility of the family as a unit of care come back here in concentrated form.
Sen's line descends from the Bengali tradition of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, but her use of English and her interest in the cosmopolitan urban middle class set her apart from the rural and explicitly political emphases of much parallel cinema. Her territory is the chamber drama and the private wound. 15 Park Avenue is the most inward of her films. The communal violence that erupts in the open in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer is here taken inside the psyche of one damaged woman. Working largely outside the commercial mainstream, Sen brought mental illness and the ethics of care into a cinema that had rarely been willing to look at either.
Reception and Legacy
The film divided its reviewers even as it collected honours. The central recognition was the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English at the 53rd ceremony, a state endorsement of its seriousness. Sonia Chopra, writing for Rediff.com, called it "hauntingly beautiful" and praised the streak of dark humour running under the sorrow. Namrata Joshi in Outlook took the opposite view, finding the film's many intriguing associations "sketchy and open-ended" and faulting Sen for declining to pursue her themes to their full emotional depth. Taran Adarsh, reviewing for Bollywood Hungama, admired the performances and objected to the writing, the pacing and above all the ambiguity of the climax.
That ambiguity, which annoyed several of the first reviewers, is what the film's later reputation rests on. As Indian cinema and its critics have grown more attentive to the representation of mental health, 15 Park Avenue has become the reference point for a portrayal of schizophrenia that judges nothing and romanticises nothing. Its influence shows less in imitation than in the example it set: a film about psychiatric illness can decline the consolation of a cure and the spectacle of suffering at the same time, and extend to its subject the courtesy of treating her experience as real. Konkona Sen Sharma's performance is cited regularly in arguments about how such a part should be played. The film remains a fixed point in the study of Sen's career, and in the wider question of how Indian cinema imagines the interior lives of people it has usually pushed to the edge of the frame.
Commentary
What lingers is the moral weight of the closing gesture. Meethi walks into the house that should not be there and is lost to the people who love her, and Sen leaves the audience with a choice that cannot be settled. Read as fantasy, the ending is a bereavement. Read as grace, it is the granting of a happiness unavailable anywhere else. The film gives no evidence for either reading, which is a deliberate withholding rather than a failure of nerve. The psychiatrist who quietly leads the others away appears to understand that certain doors are not his to close, and it matters that the character best placed to pronounce a diagnosis is the one who declines to. Sen's refusal to adjudicate between the two readings reads as humility before a suffering the film knows it cannot resolve. It is also a rebuke to the diagnostic confidence with which medicine and society approach the mentally ill.
The reservation is real. Adarsh and Joshi were not wrong about the pacing. The Bhutan section slackens, and the chance encounter with Joydeep in a foreign country is a heavy piece of plotting for a film otherwise so careful about coincidence. The design occasionally shows its joins, with Dr Barua carrying more expository freight than a character should have to carry. Set against that is the central insight, which holds. The line between the sane and the afflicted is drawn by power as much as by truth, and love may sometimes consist in honouring the world a person has made rather than dragging her out of it. 15 Park Avenue does not resolve the questions it raises. It is better for the restraint.
