CHAPTER 16

CASE REOPENED: MRINAL SEN’S THE CASE IS CLOSED

Now over ninety, Mrinal Sen has made around thirty feature-length films (together with a number of shorts and documentaries), although few of them have been shown in the United States—and none until the American premiere of The Case Is Closed (1982) in 1984. Inarguably, the delay in Sen’s U.S. reception has been an ill wind, but it may have blown a little good. That is because, even though his work is distinguished by the attention it pays to the lives of the underprivileged in India (“untouchables,” pavement dwellers, servants), most of his films until around 1979 (with And Quiet Rolls the Dawn, whose setting and theme resemble those of The Case Is Closed) were highly polemical; indeed, in the first part of his career, he could have been described as a utopian visionary of the fervently Marxist kind. His earlier films were so overtly or urgently political that they earned Sen a reputation as India’s preeminent activist moviemaker. I am glad, therefore, that The Case Is Closed arrived in the United States first, for it is a watchful, implicative film for the most part, not a blatantly obtrusive, finger- pointing one. Like Sen’s later pictures in general (he began his career in 1955, as did Satyajit Ray), and like the best films of the Italian neorealists (whom Marxists once attacked for describing the symptoms of social problems rather than probing their capitalist-generated causes), The Case Is Closed thus adopts a subdued tone that trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions from what it has seen—which is one description of humanistic art as opposed to agit-prop, or agitational propaganda. This is not to say Sen’s earlier films aren’t worth seeing, just that they require the gentler introduction that works like The Case Is Closed, The Kaleidoscope (1981), and The Ruins (1983) can provide. I saw The Case Is Closed again recently and would like to treat it here, not only because this film got very little coverage upon its initial release in the U.S., but also because it concerns the lot of marginalized children. The story is not told from their point of view, however, though the children in this instance happen to be first-time performers as well. Not so the adults, who are professionals, but, importantly where professionals are concerned, actors with whom this Bengali Indian director has worked on other films in the past. Adapting his screenplay from a story by Ramapada Chowdhury, Sen seems to have wanted to decrease the distance between his two primary adult actors and their roles—between fiction and reality, as it were—by substituting their own first names for the first names that Chowdhury gave to his

163 Chapter 16 characters. Moreover, the director includes himself in the equation, for he gives his last name to the family that this man and woman head. Calcutta during a cold spell in 1981 is the setting. Anjan and Mamata Sen are a modestly comfortable couple with a small, lovable son. Because both parents are busy working and their child needs care, they do what many of their friends do: they engage a boy of eleven or twelve, a country boy from a poor family, to live with them as a servant and babysitter. (The youngster’s father turns him over to the couple reluctantly, with great tenderness.) But because the Calcutta winter lasts only two months, the Sens don’t buy warmer clothes for their domestic helper; and he is directed to sleep in a damp, unheated cubbyhole under a stairwell. One night, it’s so cold that the boy goes to sleep in the kitchen, which is windowless and has a small, coal-fired stove that is still burning. Ignorant of the perils of sleeping in such a space without proper ventilation, he dies of carbon-monoxide poisoning—in a room, furthermore, that is mysteriously locked from the inside. This is the pivotal event in The Case Is Closed, and it happens early. We then follow the effect of the boy’s death on the people concerned, and it’s like following a laboratory dye as it filters through tissues—staining each one of them differently. No one is criminally to blame for the houseboy’s asphyxiation, which was accidental, but different sorts of blame, of guilt, are underscored by it. The film touches, for example, on the economic conditions that made it necessary for a peasant father to lease out his son (contrasted with the Sens’ pampering of their own young son),

Figure 49. Mrinal Sen: The Case Is Closed, 1982 (India)

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