Review of A River Called Titas

A River Called Titas (also known as Time And The River) is a somewhat more sprawling later melodrama of Bengal poverty, compared to director Ritwik Ghatak's more famous earlier The Cloud-Capped Star, but just as interesting. The stories it weaves together are set in the Malo fishing community of East Bengal, now Bangladesh, the area where the director grew up. Kishore, a young fisherman who we saw as a boy in the opening, is hastily married to a young woman from a neighborhood he is visiting, so the two communities can seal a friendship. He hardly comes to know his new bride or get a good look at her when, in a scene reminiscent of the melodramatic character separations in Mizoguchi, bandits capture her at night while they are still on the water, and sleeping apart.When she gets away and floats to shore this kidnapped girl, who never even knew her husband's name, gives birth to a son, Ananta, and goes to work in the home of a more well off woman, where they process hemp to be used by the fishermen.That lady is Mungli, one of the two little girls we had seen with the young Kishore in the beginning. Ironically Kishore is in the same village but has gone crazy and keeps to himself. The wife feels a strange bond with this man, as she is somewhat estranged from the community herself. She offers to bathe him in the river. Basanti, the other girl who had befriended the wife and had lost her own husband in a fishing accident, takes care of the boy after the parents, briefly reunited, are set upon by ruffians and killed (another scene reminiscent of Mizoguchi)The boy imagines he sees his mother, brilliantly attired in the forest, as the goddess of motherhood. The son is then thrown out of Basanti's home and goes to live with others. The film climaxes with the struggle between rich creditors and the fishermen who owe them money. At one point in an inspiring Marxist moment two women hurl one of the creditors into the water. Another debtor talks back to a creditor, who then kills himself. But the rich conspire to break up the fishermen and even use theater to distract them-ironic as Ghatak's background was in left wing drama. The feisty Basanti fights with a rich man, and they then set fire to the poor people's huts. Toward the end of the film, in anticipation of a later era's environmentalism, we see the river drying up, as the women of the village gather by its banks like a Greek chorus.Basanti walks across what has become a desert,she is wrapped in a blanket and carries an empty bowl as she begs for food. She sees a little boy running through the grass (probably a rice field, the rich had bought their land to convert from fishing to farming)The boy has a toy whistle made of leaf and reminds her of the child she never had herself, but wished for. Despite all the suffering we have seen in this incredibly melodramatic series of events, this ending seems to show hope for the future. Ghatak's style here shows his previous richly textured images,with characters often looming in closeup in the foreground; creative use of sound and music; and feeling for local customs and details, though there are also some more modern touches like zooms. The way he shows the changes over time for a poor community and its kind of life makes an interesting comparison with Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, which did the same for a well off bourgeois family The movie also reminds one, in its sometimes strident class struggle of the fisherfolk, of Visconti's La Terra Trema. Last, the lyrical images of the river delta/swamp terrain bring to mind Flaherty's documentary The Louisiana Story.Yet Ghatak, despite all these references, is in a realm by himself as an Indian auteur.