As the film opens, GP Sanjay Banerjee (Girish Karnad) comes home to find his wife Manju (Sharmila Tagore) collapsed on the kitchen floor. She is rushed to hospital but cannot be saved. Each of their three daughters are immediately summoned to the hospital and thereafter they all remain at the family home for the five days leading up to the funeral, during which time they each recall memories of their wife and mother, argue, grieve and fight and ultimately come to know and understand each other much better.
*****
Life Goes On is the directorial debut of Sangeeta Datta, for which she won the Audience Award at last year’s London Asian Film Festival and Best Feature at the Pravasi Film Festival in New Delhi in 2010. She certainly cannot be said to lack ambition, aiming with her first feature for a family saga encompassing grief, regret, familial strife, religious intolerence, the legacy of India’s 1947 partition and a King Lear subtext. It is a film of very effective moments and some affecting performances even if as a whole it suffers from some shortcomings.
Sanjay’s three daughters are married to a white Englishman, a lesbian and pregnant by a Muslim boyfriend respectively, though it seems that only the third of these really represents an issue for their father. He carries with him and shares in what is far and away the film’s most evocative scene, painful, harrowing memories of the fighting and persecution that took place during the partition of India. These experiences, coupled with his heightened anxiety regarding Islamic fundamentalism and its possible impact on life in contemporary London leave Sanjay deeply mistrustful of Dia’s boyfriend and he forbids her to mention or even see him any longer. She of course refuses to honour this commandment (and it is unquestionably delivered to her in such terms) accusing him of being a racist, more concerned with his reputation and standing that the happiness and desires of his daughter.
It is a situation, a predicament without an obvious, simple solution, however the film takes the necessary time for Sanjay to come to a realisation of the reasons for his prejudice and the possibility of getting past it. It is not a hurried or contrived arc and is believably handled by Karnad. What is less well handled is the friction between the sisters. There are a couple of scenes where they argue and unfortunately the quality of the acting is not up to scratch, resulting in a slightly “Hollyoaks” approach of using lots of shouting to try to convey strongly held feelings. The acceleration of Dia during these arguments from 0-60 in the blink of an eye simply does not convince and stands starkly at odds with the slow-burn of many of the other tempers on display. A lot of shouting by her does not serve to show how passionately she feels and instead causes her to come across as brattish and spoilt.
These moments are a real shame as they do tend to detract from the enjoyment of the film’s better elements. The flashbacks that each character enjoys, as they remember conversations with Manju that feed into their present day situations are very well directed, managing to be rose-tinted but not cloying, affecting but not sentimental. Entirely in flashback and filtered through the memories of the principal cast, Manju is presented as a fully-fledged character, well-rounded and evocatively portrayed.
The finale is a little trite, everything wrapped up in a ribbon and everyone getting on swimmingly, but the film gets away with it by having the courage earlier on to address the emotional and psychological fallout caused by India’s partition and thereby balancing the tone of the film’s at times disparate elements. Given the scope of themes covered by the film and with the exception of a few dud acting performances, Sangeeta Datta seems to be a director of genuine promise, with an informed eye on the past and an attentive finger on the contemporary pulse.
Life Goes On is enjoying a limited theatrical release, so it may take a bit of tracking down, but it is worthwhile if you can.
[Rating:3/5]
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NogKLlFr2vs’]
