Raakhee Gulzar Shines Bright In Shiboprosad-Nandita Roy’s Charming Family Saga

The directorial duo Shiboprosad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy double-handedly rescued Bengali cinema from box office blues with the blockbuster true-life crime thriller Bohurupi in 2024.

It is not short of astonishing how far removed the world of Aamar Boss, the directorial duo’s new heartwarming and, yes, heart-warning, work moves from their previous film.

This time there is more familial frisson, more gloss too, than we normally get to see in Bangla films. A lot of this warmth and sophistication comes from Raakhee Gulzar as the tough-cookie matriarch Shubra Goswami, who lights up every frame each time she is on screen. And when she is not, we miss her presence, although the supporting cast is very agreeable, especially Sauraseni Maitra, who is elegantly emphatic as Sarbani, an employee at a Bangla publishing house helmed by Animesh Goswami (played with admirable empathy by co-director Shiboprosad Mukherjee), who tries hard to be the best version of himself as a son (to Raakhee’s ironclad matriarch’s part, which seems like a mix of what the actress played in Ram Lakhan and Yeh Vaada Raha), husband and employer.

Of course, he slips up. It is not easy to navigate one’s instincts and ego around a woman as strong as Shubhra Goswami. Mukherjee, as a son torn between the impulse to pursue what he thinks is the correct line of action and his mother’s whims, creates an impulsive balance between duty and self-assertion. It is a performance far more complex than it seems.

The mother’s idealised sense of self is shown to be in constant battle with the ground reality. And it is a joy to behold how the actress can express so much approval or the opposite in just one glance or the pursing of the lips.

Ironically, the narrative often takes the breezy, facile way out of complex familial dynamics. For example, the core crisis of daycare for the elderly is, in one section of the narrative, whittled down to a welter of whimsical elders who come across as caricatures. If only looking after the elderly were so much fun, for the elders and the caregivers.

There is also this painfully embarrassing inter-‘lewd’ when a sodden poet drops in, threatening to urinate on the publishers for royalty. This “comic relief” is completely unnecessary. It is like peppering an already appetising dish.

The sense of joie de vivre never deserts the narration; even in the grim moments when the mother-son relationship takes on a confrontational hue, there is always the feeling that despair won’t have its way. Not here. Not now.

Aamar Boss celebrates filial ties with lots of singing, dancing, winking and swirling through a sea of splendourous dreaminess. For me, Animesh’s relationship with his mother worked much better than his tenuous, troubled ties with his wife Moushumi (Srabanti Chatterjee), who comes across as unstable and insecure. Women with career ambitions continue to be punished in our cinema. But then there is Sauraseni Maitra’s Sharbani singing Tagore’s ‘Madhuro tomar shesh je na pai’ into the night for her beloved. Time stands still. Raakhee’s Shubra would probably commission Sharbani to do an audiobook on Tagore’s songs.