Biswaprakash portrays in various shades of grey an intelligent young man caught in the contradictions of small-town life in the ancient Hindu religious centre of Puri. Located by the sea, Puri doubles as a tourist resort, complete with many foreign visitors. Biswa has many questions and ambitions which lead him to a variety of experiences. One in particular is responsible for his coming of age. The film is about an individual quest riddled with disappointments, yet one lightened with a paradoxical sense of fulfilment. At another level, the film is about the ambivalent co-existence of tradition and modernity.I like Biswaprakash for its narrative style, an engaging fusion of drama and documentary; its impressive formal and visual qualities; the mood of serenity that pervades its long duration; theperformance of its principal player; and its strong, unapologetic desire to be culture-specific – to discuss characters and situations authentically in the context of a given society at a given point of time. The suffocation in the soul and the limbs of a restless youth wanting to reach out to the world has been quietly and movingly realised. This is the kind of cinema that needs to be supported in a film world largely surrendered to the Philistinism of unrestrained sound and spectacle. (Vidyarty Chatterjee is film editor of the Indian magazine Economic Times.)
