…and she discovers in a very fine morning that she is living two lives in two bodies at the same time. This is the idea of the film ‘Chinmayi’ by Gautam Chatterjee. This film is addressed to the twilight room of each heart who wants to watch a movie to attain deep silence and quietude in heart.
Apparently it seems a love story but from the next frame it takes us in an amazing zone of life, dormant and unexplored. Gautam makes movies in a different language termed as Twilight Cinema. He redefines cinema as commercial and classic. He says art cinema is an impossibility for each step in making a movie is art, idea, screenplay, location, camera, colour and editing. Commercial cinema is one that reproduces the reality already done, either in society or in a novel e.g. Gangajal or Pather Panchali. Classic cinema is new, utilises all capacities and scopes of cinematography. Cinematograph is an art medium that waits for its poet. So classic cinema is poetic cinema, in other terms. In the same breathe; Gautam has developed this cinematographic art as a twilight language to introduce this language as a sacred and secret way to share wisdom only grown on this Asiatic earth.
Chinmayi, the central character, played by Astha Tripathi, attends both twilight rooms of her heart embodied two shades of the same consciousness. This represents the very Upanisadic idea that the same consciousness is walking through all feet and eating through all mouths.
The rhythm and the ground tone of the film is quintessentially profound that resuscitates the latent side of the audience. It moves with the soft use of music by Ludovico Einaudi and words uttered by the actor Astha in low pitch. She sings too in a superimposed tone of mind in several frames dissolved in one another.
Chinmayi premiered in Dehradoon on 5th July among the sensitive audience.
