Love, and Dementia
Film Review: ‘That Gusty Morning’
The movie is 29 minutes long.
Assamese filmmaker Jahnu Barua begins ‘That Gusty Morning’ with the picture of a seated man, ‘unmarking’ college answer papers: he is meticulously and painfully erasing the pencil marks on the answer papers. Then, a young woman enters, and both the older man and she are preparing the stage for when ‘she’ will wake up. They need to be prepared for the time she wakes.
In between, as in Anton Chekov’s stories, you can hear the gusting wind, rattling window panes, and Nature, unquiet. The stage is being set there, too.
Suddenly, there is the noise of rattling bolts on the door. ‘She’ is awake, and she is trying to open the door, glassy-eyed and overwrought because she has to go to college.
It is Seema Biswas, in one of the finest portrayals of intense womanhood I have ever seen.
So begins an encapsulated family drama that has you on the edge of your seat with tension and attention. I cannot unfold the plot without the danger of spoilers, so I am not going to. It is a carefully designed, compassionately created cameo about a time when parents become childlike, and children, their parents. Arun Nath, Kopil Bora, Urmila Mahanta deliver sterling performances.
Every shot and scene is so fraught with emotional tension that we feel drained at the end of it. By the time it is over, we descend into a morass of pity, angst, and uncertainty.
In every sense of the word, it is a beautiful movie and precisely what one needs in this day and age, when the prevailing mood seems to be veering crazily between thoughtless flippancy and bottomless wretchedness.
Tender and thoughtful, poignant and evocative, this superbly crafted movie is a treat for both the eyes and the heart. So do watch it, if you can.
