Manikbabur Megh—The Cloud and the Man—is a film about a lonely man falling helplessly in love with a cloud. Or the other way around. It boasts of a captivating performance by Chandan Sen, a stage and screen veteran whokingbet, despite his staggering talent, continues to be Bengal’s best-kept secret. The film marks the debut of a remarkable directorial voice in the form of Abhinandan Banerjee, who also wrote the screenplay. The central character of Manikbabu is an exceptional role, etched with extreme care and performed with great virtuosity by Sen.

Manikbabu revels in his loneliness—his isolation is not imposed but self-inflicted. He loves nothing more than to be left to himself, tending to his dying father and to the plants on his terrace. When his father dies, the distraught but stoic Manikbabu feels a presence, a shade overhead. It seems to follow him wherever he goes. Thus begins one of the most bizarre but moving love stories to be filmed in recent times.

Sen’s parents were involved in the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), so theatre flourished in him organically. He has been a part of Bengali theatre ever since the late 70s. Among his teachers was the late great Utpal Dutt. It was in the mid-1980s that Sen started doing television and then graduated to the movies. Whether it was a key “supporting” role or bit parts, Sen managed to leave his mark. But barring one film called Aloy Phera, where he played a member of the Lodha tribe, there have been no significant lead roles coming his way. Until now. From the first scene to the last, Manikbabur Megh sparkles with Sen’s delectable performance.

After a goalless first quarter, Korea struck just 36 seconds into the second quarter with Jungjun Lee finding the net due to a mistake from Pakistan goalkeeper Abdullah Ishtiyaq Khan. The goal remained the difference between the two teams till the half-time.

BY Outlook Sports Desk

So, how did he approach the role of Manikbabu, a recluse who is supposed to be in a relationship with a wisp gliding through the ether? “I imagined that it was a person I was falling in love with. To me, she was a person, not merely a cloud. I thought it best to look at it that way, at least in the beginning. But gradually, as we progressed, I began seeing it/her as a cloud,” says Sen.

Throughout several interviews, Sen has been insisting that the film is, at its core, just a good old love story. But when the script reached his desk, he could immediately see it for what it was.

“Fortunately, I have a bad habit of reading the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee and Rabindranath Tagore. As a result, I am aware of magic realism, and how rare it is that one encounters it in a screenplay. But when that happens, nothing could be more pleasurable,” he says.

The screenplay of Manikbabur Megh had such subtlety and nuance that when he read it, Sen looked at the 23-year-old Banerjee sceptically. “I actually gave him a suspicious look. Had this boy really written THIS script?”

For Banerjee, etching out the character of Manikbabu has been a lifelong quest. “The story idea wouldn’t have come to me if it hadn’t been for this character (of Manikbabu). For me, the cloud is a harbinger for the liberation of the character.” Cinema has, for the longest time, examined loneliness in all its hues. Right from Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) and Theodore (Her) to Fern (Nomadland), there has been a long line of lonely men and women on screen. But it is seen as an undesirable state, with characters finding ways of avoiding it or reeling from the impact of it. It is supposed to invoke pity or empathy. But for Manikbabu, loneliness is celebratory.

“This character was brewing in me for a long time, and it was embedded with loneliness, but not how it is normally portrayed. It’s about the acceptance and celebration of loneliness. Very spontaneously and naturally, he likes to avoid crowds. If a lift is crowded, he would gladly take the stairs. On a bench, he would shift a little only to have some space between him and the other people. It’s these choices of the character that will create the resonance where a man can find that kind of connection with a cloud,” explains Banerjee.

This is a hypersensitive man, one who is able to perceive things other “normal” people can’t. He takes care to avoid stepping on a flower, picks it up and tucks it beside his father’s old tape-recorder. One outcome of his self-imposed isolation is that he barely speaks, if at all. He is not taciturn; he just doesn’t feel the need to talk.

In this respect, Manikbabu’s solitudinarianism brings to mind Hirayama, the central character in Wim Wender’s Perfect Days. Much like Manikbabu, Hirayama likes to keep to himself. Koji Yakusho, while speaking about his performance in Perfect Days, said: “Films are expressed more powerfully in those moments that don’t have the words.”

Sen, whose layered performance of Manikbabu predated Yakusho’s work by at least four years (Perfect Days was shot in Tokyo around 2023, while Manikbabur Megh was filmed in Kolkata in the peak summer of 2019), says what drew him to Banerjee’s script was the scope for “onuchcharito shonglap”, which roughly—and inadequately—translates to “unpronounced dialogue”. What he refers to is the ability to convey the contents of dialogue without uttering a word. “One of the things that attracted me to the script was that I had to speak an infinite number of such unpronounced dialogues. In a 97-minute-long film, I got to do that for 90 minutes. It is the dream of any actor,” Sen says.

For Sen, Manikbabu has been, quite literally, the role of a lifetime. “Because of their political affiliations, my parents had to often be underground and leave me to do things on my own. From a very young age, I was able to travel to school by myself or go out on the streets alone,” he says. This experience of being comfortable in his own company equipped Sen with the kind of mindset that prepared him for Manikbabu. It was as if life had been. Besides, it is his belief that the sacred duty of the actor is to observe, and especially observe those who are slightly different in some way. “An actor must see such people with a keen eye and then when the time comes, not imitate them but capture their essence,” he avers.

As far as Banerjee is concerned, Manikbabu also harks back to one of Bibhutibhushan’s abiding creations, one that was immortalised on the screen by another “Manik”—little Apu. In a poignant episode from Bibhutibhushan’s Pather Panchali, Apu’s father Harihar scolds the child for staring with his mouth wide open all the time. “A person like that, whose eyes are not merely recording devices, sees more than we ever can,” says Banerjee. “This ability shapes their psyche,” he adds. He sees himself as a smarter version of Manikbabu, he elaborates, the one who could sail through societal norms to make things happen. But why a cloud? The only parallel that comes to mind is Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik, in which a taxi-driver is in a dysfunctional relationship with his Chevrolet jalopy. “The film is an allegory of liberation through the force of nature. That force could very well have been a tree,” explains Banerjee, “but a cloud is a mobile thing. Its shape changes, mood changes, it evolves according to seasons and times of the day.”

In the end, Sen reminds us, Manikbabu is a part of us, with some notable exceptions “There’s a bit of Manikbabu in all of us, except politicians and the likes of Elon Musk,” says Sen.

Amborish Roychoudhury is A national film award-winning writerkingbet, biographer and film historian