Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi’s “Shadowbox” struggles to overcome its plain aesthetic. The tale of a family of three strained by a father’s odd behavior — owing to what appears to be PTSD — the neorealist Bengali- and Hindi-language drama hints at numerous ideas in the realm of gender, administrative power and the woes of the Indian working class. These themes end up distinctly malformed, but the film is not without its strengths. Its central drama is usually interesting enough, thanks to the impeccable depth of its performances.
Tillotama Shome — known to Western audiences from “Monsoon Wedding” and the French-Indian drama “Sir” — is a sure bet to lead any work in the visual medium, owing to how effortlessly she creates entire worlds through silent struggle. She plays the overqualified housemaid Maya, an educated woman doing her best to make ends meet by serving tea and performing other household odd jobs in order to raise her teenage son, Debu (Sayan Karmakar), in the suburbs of Kolkatta (formerly Calcutta).
Complicating matters, however, is the debilitating anxiety of her husband Sundar (Chandan Bisht), a retired soldier and current frog farmer, whose muffled alienation at home is interspersed with outbursts elsewhere. Nobody quite considers him dangerous. In fact, he’s usually dismissed as an inconvenience, a “crazy” person, by Maya’s family and the local schoolchildren, and his reluctance to let a shaving blade touch him before a job interview is portrayed with wonderful comedic timing. However, when his drinking buddy turns up murdered, and Sundar himself goes missing, the movie’s premise pivots toward Maya trying to balance her ongoing employment with figuring out where he husband might be, and whether or not he’s culpable in the apparent crime.
Even once this occurs, very little in the movie actually seems to change. Its measured compositions are broken up by a single, handheld moment of intensity the very second the plot turns, but little beyond this point is imbued with chaos or unpredictability — even of the subtle variety. From there on out, the story is bifurcated between characters continuing to condescend to Maya (including the smarmy, opportunistic policemen charged with finding Sundar), and Debu wandering aimlessly through his life and education. All he wants is for parental guidance and for someone to understand how much he cares about the art of dance, an idea unfortunately relegated to the movie’s backdrop. Maya’s efforts to give Debut a leg up in life are constantly derailed, both by the unfolding plot and by the family’s larger circumstances. Sadly, the drama is often just as rudderless as Debu’s meandering.
That said, Bisht is both utterly convincing and heartbreaking as Sundar, a man who feels trapped within his body, desperate to break free and put words to his demons. Whenever he’s on screen, the frame takes on a gentle posture. Few Indian movies have so gently zeroed in on the way mental health conditions are used as a pretext to strip people of their humanity, even though the camera rarely probes Sundar enough to rebuild his personhood from the inside-out, or dramatize whatever haunts his waking moments. That Sundar often occupies the corners of the frame (especially in scenes he shares with Maya) speaks directly to his outward sense of remove and dissociation — from society, and from himself — but the result is a sympathetic portrayal at a distance, despite Bisht’s tremendous efforts to engender empathy.
While the film does eventually build to an enrapturing confrontation (shot in deep shadow that creates excitement and intrigue), “Shadowbox” is too restrained to let its drama linger, or permeate the fabric of the screen. Despite its family ties being slowly infected by doubt, it’s a film with little sense of mystery or dramatic possibility, even though it serves as a remarkable acting showcase.
