'Raincoat' Two estranged lovers' tryst on rainy evening
By Aparajita Ghosh Film critic, ApunKaChoice.Com
An evening’s encounter between two estranged lovers who pretend to each other ‘how fine life has turned out’, even as they keep repressing their dormant and smoldering love – Rituparno Ghosh’s ‘Raincoat’ is a simple and sensitive tale of how love stories usually end in real life.
To start with, the film has a beautiful setting. A rainy evening and the hero Manoj (Ajay) borrowing a raincoat to go and meet Niru (Ash), the beautiful girl whom he loved but who got married to some rich guy because Manoj did not have a social standing to assert his love and claim her hand.
The
scene then shifts to Niru’s neglected house. Even as Niru goes about telling Manoj the tales of her lavish marriage and the affluent life she has been living, the dilapidated state of her dimly lit house insinuate that reality perhaps is the contrary. Similarly Manoj too pretends to her that he has been doing fine and earning his living making television soaps.
But their fancy facade gradually begins to fall apart as they get into conversation, punctuated with flashbacks from their amorous past and underscored with their emotional outbursts that linger somewhere between anger and love.
‘Raincoat’ is a finely written story replete with thought-provoking dialogues and silences that are pregnant with meaning. Rituparno has kept many things open-ended in the movie and instead of tying the story in a neat knot he has kept things unsaid and open for the interpretation of the viewers.
Above all, the film has excellent performances from both Ash and Ajay.
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