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Bridge over troubled souls

A short film by a little-known production team serves up as a riveting thriller

“Connection doesn’t care about the laws of the land. Your soul will be pulled to the place it belongs” (Anonymous).

The Bengali short film Bridge (connection of two souls) under the banner of Tripod Productions gets off to an eerie start with two voice overs in farewell mode.

“So, it’s all over today?” The male voice breathes heavily. The female says in a small voice: “Yes, this is the last time we have together…” 

The scene opens rather stunningly to the sound of a doorbell ringing. The camera pans on to a desk clock showing four minutes to four. It is when the door opens that you realize that it is not four in the afternoon. The penumbra of pre-dawn darkness frames the female protagonist’s face in a kind of quiet menace.

The camera captures her silhouette with a mane of hair falling over her face (a throwback to The Exorcist?) just before the two embark on a conversation that is so casual as to be eerie. Imagine asking an ex flame – casually – about a cotton candy man whose presence was a constant in one’s childhood in the wee hours of the morning. As the two protagonists, Neelima and Anjan, chat back and forth like old friends the viewer is lulled into believing that things could never be better between two former lovers. A phone call from Neelima’s brother shatters the belief in a way that wrenches the gut.

So, was the meeting a dream, a hallucination, or something else? Viewers are left groping for answers inside their gut.

The cinematography and direction by Soham Biswas and Debanjan Ghosh have to be commended. Acting on the part of the main characters Subarna Mitra who plays Neelima and Soutrik Roy (Anjan), who also happens to be a filmmaker, is utterly convincing.        Kudos, too, to the editing team for having tightly edited such a moving script penned by Shiladitya Chatterjee.

Sub-titles in English need to be revised- and that’s about the only flaw in the film.

A must watch for lovers of good cinema.

By: Nazar Dehalvi

Pic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSlfPN1jnAY&t=1s