This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-10, May-Jun 1982)
With this, her first film, Aparna Sen has set a new pace for Indian cinema, and shown what breathtaking freshness a woman’s vision can bring to the screen. Together, she and Jennifer Kendal have created a work of art that is in every way, technically and thematically, a breakthrough, a revelation of what cinema can be, do, say.
Even the most progressive of Indian film makers have rarely been able to avoid the temptation of presenting women characters as romanticized heroines — with conventionally “beautiful” faces and figures, carefully posed at doorways, or gazing into space with dark, mysterious eyes. Here is a film which looks at a woman through a woman’s eyes, and the difference is apparent, is there for us to see and feel. Jennifer Kendal as Violet Stoneham, the elderly Anglo-Indian school teacher, is unashamedly and beautifully a woman — without cosmetic treatment, without affected mannerisms, without eternal youth. A woman like any one of us, our mothers, grandmothers, daughters. She dares to be a woman on the screen, rather than a heroine. Few other actresses have dared this.