Ashmita Guha Neogi’s Sīlan Is An Aching, Arresting Mood-piece

Ashmita Guha Neogi’s Sīlan opens to a wordless stretch. It’s raining. Two estranged siblings, Rachana (Mitali Jagtap Varadkar) and Prakash (Bhushan Vikas), come together in the wake of their mother’s passing. They don’t have any niceties to divvy. The circumstance has forced their having to acknowledge each other’s existence. Neither quite knows how to speak to the other without reiterating the wedge between them. However, amidst such an exigency, how long can they hold off on confronting their emotions towards one another? It’s inevitable. Neogi traverses this delicate, uncomfortable and deeply intimate emotional territory in doleful notes.

Sīlan is an atmospherically rich work. Neogi’s screenplay is spare, folding the relationship between the two individuals in exchanges initially cold, uncertain and wary. We aren’t apprised how long it has been since Prakash moved away. He’s not been in touch. When Rachana asks him about his faraway house, where he lives with his wife and kids, the yearning her look holds is piercing.

Rachana stayed with their mother. She didn’t marry unlike Prakash, who went out to have his own life and start his separate family. Having had to assume the role of the primary caregiver, Rachana was eventually shorn of a social life—rather any kind of life beyond the house and its faded walls. All her dreams petered out. When Prakash suggests that she could sell the house and move out somewhere, she murmurs, resigned: “Who knows me outside of the house? Whom do I know?” She can’t envisage a new life—prioritizing her own happiness and desires. To drift into some other terrain that’s beyond her hometown is an alien thought—despite the toxicity she would have to continue living with. Rachana’s existence, woven wholly around her mother, took up all her space, her being. What did this relationship look like? Just a few lines by her, sharing a glimpse of living with their mother, suffice.

“I thought of killing myself,” she recounts. Somehow, she clasped onto life, staying afloat through this all-consuming relationship. She wrestled with love that curdled and the bitterness that set in. With the mother no longer alive, Rachana gets the reins on her personhood. Her future seems tentative; its possibilities are what she has to wake up to and embrace. All she knows is she can’t leave the place. She has to reconcile herself to cleaving the rest of her life here, irrespective of its emotional implications.

Varadkar transmits a hollowing out of spirit. Her performance expands the nuggets the screenplay furnishes, humanising the strength, fatigue and melancholy. There’s weariness—from the sturdiness with which Rachana pushed through yet another day with her mother. Along with these, there also exists a repressed mischief and liveliness in her. But these aspects only bubble up late in the film.

Shaz Mohammed’s camerawork evokes cloistered intimacy in the domestic space. In an early scene, a stifling close-up captures Rachana’s tender nuzzles to her mother, which turn feral in bereavement. Her anguish at the parting from her mother is inextricable from the intense emotional vortex welling up.

The figures of the siblings are almost bunched together despite an itch for detachment. The tension and chafing between them is palpable. The camera always frames them as one turned away from the other. They don’t see eye to eye. A directness of encounter is accompanied with both hitting rough edges. She tries to dredge up moments from their childhood; he grows uneasy at the remembrances. Sīlan mines subtle, plaintive drama from proximity and separation—both physical and emotional. Charged with longing and evasion, Neogi constructs a narrative in the softest of notes.

Sīlan screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) 2024.