The voices of Mrinal Sen and Payal Kapadia

Mrinal Sen and Payal Kapadia's experiments with documentary-style techniques in their fiction films have much in common

- Sohini Chattopadhyay

Kharij, which won the Jury Prize in 1983 at Cannes, was the last film by an Indian to win a competition award at the festival before Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix this year. Directed by Mrinal Sen, the overlooked middle syllable in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak triad, Kharij too is shaped by absence—of a boy child who worked as a "servant" to an amiable middle-class Bhadralok couple. This couple employ a boy the same age as their beloved 8- or 9-year-old son Pupai to attend to him, and to help the youngish wife, Mamata, around the home. One unusually cold night in Calcutta, the boy sleeps in the kitchen because of the warmth from the coal oven and doesn't wake up the next morning, dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning in the closed kitchen space. This happens within the first 15 minutes.

The rest of the taut 95-minute film is about the investigation into the boy's death.

In Kapadia's film, one of the three central characters Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is haunted by the absence of her husband, said to be working in Germany. He has ghosted her—not called in a year, nor does he take her phone calls. She is a quiet person, unruffled on the outside. She has to be; she is a nurse trained to deal with medical crises. She does not let on that her husband's ghosting is haunting her. Yet when a mysterious, gleaming rice cooker arrives from Germany without a note, she gets up from her bed at night to embrace it alone, unseen.

TIED TO THE CITY

Both are city films. Kharij is rooted in the Calcutta of the 1980s ruled by the world's longest-running Left government.