Kapurush: The most underrated film of Satyajit Ray’s career predates Past Lives by decades, but is even more stirring

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Madhabi Mukherjee in a still from Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush (The Coward).

In Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush (The Coward), a lonely screenwriter runs into his former girlfriend after being stranded in the boondocks. It’s a melancholic hidden gem that reunites the great filmmaker’s Charulata stars Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee as the former lovers, ordered by fate itself to bring closure to their relationship. The screenwriter is Amitabha Roy, who is told in the film’s strikingly shot opening scene that his broken down car will take at least two days to be repaired. The deserted tea estate that he finds himself in doesn’t exactly have a selection of hotels and repair shops for his convenience, which leaves Amitabha in a rather tight spot.

But the manager of the tea estate — a loud, pipe-smoking caricature named Bimal Gupta — overhears Amitabha’s conversation at the repair shop, and offers to host him at his bungalow until his car is fixed. Amitabha agrees, but discovers the second he sets foot in Bimal’s house that he is married to Karuna, the woman he fumbled several years ago. It’s like he’s seen a ghost. They exchange a silent glance — the first of many — as Ray’s tightly wound, elegantly written, and masterfully staged domestic drama uncoils. Kapurush is perhaps his most underrated movie, one that Ray himself considered deserving of a far better reception than the one it received.

In many ways, Amitabha feels entitled to better treatment as well. In the first few moments that he steals alone with Karuna, he asks why she’s treating him so coldly — as if he was expecting her to run into his arms the second she saw him, like the heroine of one of his movies. But all she does is avert her eyes and leave the room, resolutely refusing to meet his unwavering gaze throughout the evening. This frigidity also permeates the scene in which Karuna enters the guest quarters that Amitabha has been assigned to bring him a towel and some water.

kapurush the coward

Soumitra Chatterjee, Haradhan Bandhopadhyay and Madhabi Mukherjee in a still from Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush.

It’s highly dramatic face-off. Karuna suspects that he has orchestrated this encounter. And who knows? Amitabha might have concocted a million similar plans over the years. As fate would have it, however, the reunion that he so desperately craved happened through coincidence and not calculation. But Karuna thinking otherwise bothers him, almost as much as the violent indifference that she appears to be treating him with. There is a good reason, as we will learn through the course of the 70-minute film, why Ray has assigned Amitabha the rather derisive title of ‘Coward’.

Short as it is, Kapurush finds the time to launch into two extended flashbacks that provide some basic details about Karuna and Amitabha’s past lives. Many years ago, when they were still together, she presented him with a life-changing choice. Karuna told him that she was being sent away by her disapproving family, and urgently suggested that they elope. Amitabha dilly-dallied, and his indecisiveness cost him the love of his life. “It is not time you need, you need something else,” she said, dropping the metaphorical mic on her way out. And just like that, in a moment of profound heartbreak, she eviscerated him from her life.

In the present, he attempts to manipulate Karuna by telling her that he hasn’t fallen for anybody else this whole time. Their dynamic is dissimilar to the one shared by the two protagonists in the recent Oscar-nominated film Past Lives. Unlike director Celine Song, Ray just can’t bring himself to hide his contempt for the needy male suitor. In Past Lives, viewers could have justifiably resonated with Hae Sung, who made a feeble attempt to reconnect with his former flame a decade after their separation. In Kapurush, Ray gives the audiences little wiggle room to decide with whom their sympathies lie, especially after the first flashback.

He sets up this subversion fairly early on, during Amitabha and Bimal’s first meeting. On the drive over to the bungalow, when Amitabha had no idea that Karuna was around the corner, a curious Bimal brought up the central tenet of romantic movies: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. But there is an ingrained objectification in this rule itself. The boy is the only one with an active role in this scenario, losing and recovering the girl as if she is some kind of package. Karuna most certainly isn’t. In Kapurush, she gets to decide who she wants to be with.

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Haradhan Bandhopadhyay, Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee in a still from Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush.

Ray doesn’t exactly spare the pompous Bimal, either. When he isn’t listening to Rabindra sangeet, he’s humming the national anthem to himself. Not out of some sense of patriotism, but probably because he enjoys the tune. Later, he comments complacently about the caste system, while chewing on a slice of bread served to him by a turbaned servant. What an astute bit of character work. Bimal appears to have become bitter with time; he drinks incessantly, and doesn’t even seem to be aware — let alone appreciative — of his wife’s talents as a painter. As he talks about the boredom of plantation life, Ray’s camera pans empathetically towards Karuna. Of all the people that she had to settle down with, it had to be him. All of this, in a way, is to underline how unpardonable Amitabha’s past actions were, and to suggest that he will probably suffer the consequences of his mistake for the rest of his days.

Like in Past Lives, there’s a scene in Kapurush where all three characters sit down together for a drink. Crucially, Bimal remains happily oblivious about Amitabha and Karuna’s shared history, the tension in the room failing to penetrate his thick skull. In Past Lives, the green flag husband understood that he’s the third wheel, at least temporarily. And so, he silently backed off, not because he’d conceded defeat, but because he was absolutely secure in his relationship; he was sure that his wife wouldn’t just walk out on him. In Kapurush, this scene is rife with uncertainty. Will the tactless Amitabha blab about his love for Karuna in front of Bimal, will the armour that she has put up around herself reveal its cracks? It’s playful and provocative, tense yet tantalising.

Chatterjee plays Amitabha like a simpering fool, while Mukherjee’s proud performance wouldn’t feel out of place in a film noir. Kapurush relies more on the faces of its two stars than most films. Ray’s camera doesn’t merely admire Mukherjee, it is — and there is no other way to explain this — in absolute love with her. His blocking is meticulous and authoritative, muscular and musical. Never, for instance, has a shot of somebody pacing behind a closed door been this full of yearning. It’s Karuna, clearly cursing the googly that life has bowled at her. On this side of the door, Amitabha is having difficulty sleeping as well. He wants some pills, but he lacks the confidence to knock on Karuna’s door, too terrified of a possible confrontation. In the film’s final scene, Karuna asks for her pills back, symbolically submitting to her sorry existence. Only Ray could’ve made an act of surrender this dignified.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.

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