Prathyush Parasuraman
Rima Das takes her fragile, interiorized cinema to the city. Her rapturously applauded previous two films — Village Rockstars (2017) and Bulbul Can Sing (2018) — shot in Das’s home village of Kalardiya in Lower Assam.
There was no need for a background score because nature was ambient enough, flushing the soundscape with crickets, lapping waters, rustling paddy, bleating goats, grunting pigs.
Tora’s Husband, as it opens, challenges what you would have assumed of a Rima Das film. It is not just the visual of urban spaces. But there is a poignant background score, too, something that was conspicuously missing from her previous films.
This is Das coasting the peak she sculpted as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and producer. Tora’s Husband unfolds like life, with easy lyricism, building up to a quiet heartbreak.
It is true that there is more yearning as an adult — not just for a future, but a past, too. Jaan keeps flipping through photos of his childhood football championships.