15, Park Avenue

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

–

15, Park Avenue
Directed by	Aparna Sen
Produced by	Bipin Vohra
Written by	Aparna Sen
Starring	Konkona Sen Sharma, Shabana Azmi, Soumitra Chatterjee, Waheeda Rehman, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Rahul Bose, Kanwaljeet Singh
Release date(s)	2005
Running time	116 min.
Language	English
Budget	Rs 2.5 [crores](approx. $556,000
IMDb profile

15, Park Avenue is a movie made by the Indian Bengali director Aparna Sen.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film portrays the relationship between a girl, Meethi, (played by Konkona Sen Sharma) who suffers from schizophrenia(The same disease john nash had in 'A Beautiful Mind'), and her elder half-sister Anjali (played by the actress Shabana Azmi). Meethi (Mitali) hails from an upper middle class family, fraught with a complex relationship structure. She is the child through the second marriage of her mother, and though this is not explored in much detail in the movie since it focuses on other issues, it is left to the viewer to extrapolate the possibilities this might have had in the onset of Schizophrenia in Meethi. Her older sister, Anu (Anjali) is a professor of Physics in the University, who is shown to be intellectual and practical, the paradox in her character arising in that she decides to forsake her personal life for her ailing younger sister. This shows her in a different light, and the viewer must face the contradiction (brilliantly essayed by Shabana Azmi) throughout the movie. Meethi is shown to have dormant schizophrenic traits in her since her childhood, as depicted in the scene where Anu tells her doctor Kunal Barua (Dhritiman Chatterjee) that Meethi has been a loner always. One observation is that Meethi refuses to go to school because she fears everyone else can hear her swallowing or gulping....and so is paranoid and ashamed about it. A traumatic gang rape by political goons causes a relapse and chronic episode of schizophrenia in Meethi, and her adolescent schizoid symptoms are exacerbated into a fully debilitating mental disorder. She lapses into incoherent delusions about a happy family and children which have been her erstwhile dreams, while in reality, her fiance Joydeep (Rahul Bose) backs out from the relationship. Clutching on to these straws, she desperately looks for her home, 15 Park Avenue, where she feels she will be at peace. A chance meeting with her ex fiance 11 years after they have broken up, gives Meethi a further impetus into her delusional world, as she touchingly trusts him to look for her home.....and now he is an outsider whom she does not recognise. For Meethi, the world is divided into her home and the outsiders, who keep her from going to her children. A child like innocence about Meethi causes the viewer to gulp down an achingly familiar lump in the throat many a times. Joydeep's wife Lakshmi(Shefali Shah), more or less sums up the film when, in a conversation with her husband, played by Rahul Bose, he tells her, describing Meethi's state of mind when they accidentally meet later, "Poor thing, she is looking for something she will never find"...she asks, "Aren't we all?"

The dark side of life, as depicted in the movie, is lit by Meethi's ignorant optimism, and innumerable times throughout the movie, we are forced to draw parallels between the reality as the world sees, and reality that Meethi experiences. Deeply anguished Anu asks her doctor once, "Why does Meethi's reality have to be a delusion? What right do we have to take away the happiness that her reality is giving her? What does she have to come back to?" Anu is torn between her sister's elusive mirage of peace and her own craving for a semblance of normalcy in life, undoubtedly, when her tired mind asks this. These are uncomfortably humane questions which one is forced to ask oneself sometime or the other in life....Guilt is a predominant colour in the landscape of this movie, depicted in the persona of every character, be it Anu, be it Joydeep or be it Mrs.Mathur (Meethi's mother played by Waheeda Rehman). Logical or illogical, it is there all the while, a strong background to this intense tale of Reality, Illusion and the thin line between the two, which Meethi crosses in the end of the movie...Towards which side, is for the viewer's sensitivity to decipher.

Aparna Sen gives us an insight into a world which exists side by side with our own, which we ignore in our seemingly placid lives, but which remains as an undercurrent all the same, deeply profound in its influences, and forces us to stop time and again to enquire into our own moorings. "15 PARK AVENUE" is the story of a mind, which believes in happiness with such insurmountable faith, that it creates that happiness away from the broken life that its reality can offer, where it can remain untouched, pristine and eternal.

The film was met with critical acclaim from critics all over India. The film producer, Mr. Bipin Vohra, is also producing another film, Yatra, set to be released in November, 2006.

The film received a National Award in 2006.