Along with Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray and their respective Trilogy on the situation of unrest in Calcutta (as it was known then) in the Seventies, Tapan Sinha made a couple of films on the same subject. The films were APANJAN and EKHONI. In fact, in a way he started the trend of political filmmaking with his 1968 ‘Apanjan’ (remade by Gulzar in Hindi as Mere Apne. There was a Kannada remake of this film too). EKHONI is a 1970 release and was based on a story by Ramapada Choudhary. The film featured Swaroop Dutta, Aparna Sen, Moushumi Chaterjee, Chinmoy Roy, Anuva Gupta, Nirmal Kumar, Subhendu Chatterjee and others.
EKHONI features a motley group of characters, their college friendship and the turn life takes for them in increasingly difficult times. Proper employment eludes most of them, some though surge forward pulling a few strings. Right from the Seventies with these above two mentioned films till his later works like Adalat O Ekti Mey, Atanka, Antardhaan, TS has chronciled the degeneration of the middle-class Bengalis. The finale of EKHONI is reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s MAHANAGAR. In both these films, the protagonist is depicted as walking the streets of Calcutta into an uncertain future.
Rating: 3.9 out of 5
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