The script comes out of engagement with the research of doctors Atul Gawande (“Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” 2014) and Siddhartha Mukherjee (“The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” 2010)—part of a conversation about the right to be informed if certain treatments may not prolong life.
The shooting of the film, with a script about a couple who refuse medical treatment, began the year before the pandemic. When lockdown was imposed, filming was shuttered in Kolkata and editing had to be completed in long-distance isolation. A film about a hallucination of medical care became an accidental commentary on the ennui of a global pandemic. The work premiered at the first international exhibition to open after lockdown, Japan’s Yokohama Triennial “Afterglow”; socially distanced audiences wore masks while watching last moments through a breathing apparatus.
A film about a hallucination of medical care became an accidental commentary on the ennui of a global pandemic.
Professor Supriya Chaudhuri of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, wrote about the film, “JOLE DOBE NA is the counterpoint to your earlier TRIPOLI CANCELLED: both are set in spaces of abandonment, in what Foucault would have called heterotopias (the airport, the hospital); also in spaces of liminality, between border and border, between life and death, and in a kind of stalled, lost, unmeasured time—yet TRIPOLI CANCELLED is ‘international’ in the very act of showing up the impossibility of internationalism/transnationalism and JOLE DOBE NA is located ‘at home,’ in the act of return (Sufiya’s return, Jyoti’s inability to leave), despite the fact that they also talk of travel and boundaries and visas and speak a cosmopolitan language (even in their choice of fiction).”
A moment on the hospital roof, as the camera glides between the couple and Kolkata’s Howrah Bridge is visible in the distance– Chaudhuri calls this “a shot that is pure Ritwik Ghatak.” Two aural flows overlap—azaan from a nearby mosque (which places the scene at dusk, maghrib prayer time) and the kalema that the husband fumbles. Marriage is sometimes a knowing, and loving, compromise–here between a Hindu family that migrated during the 1947 partition, and a Muslim family that never left West Bengal. The regulatory environment of the hospital is inured to all this, seeking only bureaucratic clarity about death rituals.
Like its precursor TRIPOLI CANCELLED, the script is layered with submerged footnotes. In the earlier film, there are references to Giorgio Agamben’s “The Witness and the Archive,” solar sightlines for praying, Hannah Arendt’s rupturing friendships, Boney M as exile karaoke, and the bar scene from Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING. In JOLE DOBE NA, there are references to Hemchandra-Azizul as inventors of fingerprint technology under British empire, taboos against marrying relatives as codified by anthropology, Jagadish Chandra’s experiments on the discovery of pain symptoms in plant life, and Syed Mujtaba Ali’s cosmopolitanism between two wars.
