Bengali movie-makers, who make the occasional film in English, have a penchant for ending on the note of a famous Shakespearean soliloquy: "Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." The lines are spoken by King Lear in Act 4, Scene 7 of the tragedy of King Lear.
When he says thus, Lear is no longer a king; he has been stripped of his regality and power and is a mere old man, manipulated into penury by evil children.
In 36 Chowrungee Lane (1981), an old school teacher of Anglo-Indian origin, mutters these lines, when she realizes that she has been used selfishly by a ruthless young Bengali couple. The movie was directed by Aparna Sen. In The Last Lear (2007), an ageing thespian, who is a retired Shakespearean actor, repeats the same lines, this time in the booming voice (whose effects are severely undercut by a terrible accent and enunciation) of Indian superstar Amitabh Bacchan. The actor is on his deathbed, having sacrificed himself at the altar of idealism.
The film is directed by the now-departed Rituporno Ghosh.
The actor, Harish Misra, retires, one presumes, out of disgust for the commercialization of culture and the decline of theatre in the face of the rising popularity of cinema. These are echos of the theme of Merchant-Ivory's beautiful Shakespeare Wallah.
When the retired thespian is lured out of his seclusion into playing the role of a clown in a movie made by a successful young filmmaker, he unravels psychologically and insists on enacting his own death scene--a crucial part of the movie's climax--instead of allowing a stuntman to do it. His insistence, combined with the young director's constant wheedling of the old actor's ego, results in the tragic death of the actor.
The Last Lear is a movie about the fall of a purist in a crassly commercial culture where he is an obvious misfit.
I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and King Lear is something I could live on were I to be marooned on an island. I resent this haphazard use of this magnificent play in Indian movies. Aparna Sen merely included a few lines at the end, and in Jennifer Kendall's enunciation the Shakespearean lines sounded Shakespearean and right. But Amitabh Bacchan's incorrigible bluster, which is a perfect vehicle for the ejection of Bollywood lines, massacres the tragic sublimity of King Lear's voice.
There is a scene in which Bacchan plays Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is awful, and I couldn't catch a single thing he said. There are other shabby attempts to solidify Shakespeare into a subtext. The retired actor is married to a young Bengali woman who compares their mating to that of Othello and Desdemona.
The Last Lear could have been about any artist who has old world ideals of what's real art and what's sham, because the stories attraction lies, not in the life of the actor, but of the lives of three women who are brought together by their personal affections for the actor. The exchanges between the three women constitute the backbone of the movie, with or without the lousy Shakespearean subtext.
Incidentally, there is one moment that stands out in my memory as more ear-catching than all of the lines added up together in the movie. A journalist is interviewing Harish Misra about another stage artist who is no more. His name is Neeraj Patel. When the journalist requests Harish to say something about "him," the thespian rudely interjects, "him" or "her?" Neeraj, Harish says with marked aversion in his voice, was a "bloody homosexual," who "talked like a woman, walked like a woman, and even slept like a woman." The word "gay" isn't used, but a deep-seated homophobia is revealed. It's ironic that a Shakespearean actor who is enlightened in a way only a Bengali bhadrolok, a quintessence of biblio culture and biblio courtesy, can, is also repulsed by homosexuality. After all, Shakespeare like no other artist, teaches us that men could be like women, and women like men, in the wink of a Prospero's wand.
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