No Bed of Roses (2017), Directed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki
A review of No Bed of Roses (2017), directed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki.
My first-ever Bangladeshi film! I was so excited to see this pop into my Netflix recommendations, especially when I saw that Irrfan Khan was starring in it. I watched this at the time I was in intensive Bengali courses, so it was the perfect way to stretch out my Bangla skills while also practicing my listening. And so this film takes on a special meaning, especially because I was studying the language when I watched it.
Because this was my first Bangladeshi film, I literally had zero expectations on what to expect stylistically. That came with some surprises as I was watching, such as the beautiful attire the women were put in, and the slow shots that reminded of a Chinese filmmaker’s: Jia Zhangke. In my Chinese cinema class, we watched one of his movies where there were a ton of shots of a boat and a river, and this film also had a lot of similar shots.
To be quite honest, I was more interested in the women of this film than the men. Let’s dig into this review, shall we?
Content
The title of this film in English is No Bed of Roses; the Bangla titled is ডুব. The English title is pretty appropriate in regards to the actual plot and narrative; our main character is a filmmaker going through a divorce and the breakup of his family. The filmmaker has cheated, causing all of this scandal in the country of Bangladesh, reaching even the tabloids. ডুব roughly means “drowning.”
There’s a lot of quit moments in this film, simple shots of Khan’s character eating alone, or a boat chugging along in the river. With dull, muted coloring and lighting at times, everything, every shot, placement, and scene, adds to this melancholic atmosphere. There’s this one life that really sticks out to me as I watch this film: his wife, Maya, is complaining to her husband. She says he acts like he isn’t really living in the present moment, because he’s always stuck dwelling on the past.
The other woman is the lead actress in one of Javed’s, Khan’s character’s, film. She’s also a friend of his daughter, which is how he even met her in the first place. We get shots of the family wandering around this beautiful new house that they had bought, robbed of any joy and a future in it. Javed seems lonely and completely crucified metaphorically by the people around him, getting phone calls during live television interviews how he is such an immoral man. But, at the end, we see his daughter’s devotion to him throughout the film, as she shows her tight bond to him even in crisis.
One thing questionable, as I noticed it, was that Irrfan Khan doesn’t speak any Bangla really? His Bangla is poor and the majority of the scenes with him he ends up reverting to English. I don’t think that was very realistic in a Bangladeshi tale, especially for someone on live national television to be speaking almost completely in English. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I found that to stick out like a sore thumb as I was watching, especially since the rest of the cast largely was speaking in Bangla.
This is also a really slow movie—I actually couldn’t watch it straight through. It was too long and slow, and so I had to split it up into segments in order to actually get through it. It can be confusing at times to discern what’s actually going on and who is who in the narrative, but, after looking some things up after watching, it became more clearer to me what was happening.
And, because of this, I don’t think we connect to the main character as much as we should have. SPOILER When he dies, everyone is emotional in some way except for me, the viewer. I found that I didn’t really care for him, despite how lonely he is depicted on the screen, and thus I don’t mourn his death with them. Instead, I am removed from the scene rather than placed with them.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an interesting film, and I can see why it was the Bangladeshi entry into the Oscars. I just wonder at times if the story truly is about the filmmaker or the people around him. I would’ve personally been more interested in delving deeper into how this impacted everyone psychologically—like literally his daughter’s friend is the second wife. We get some snippets of the daughter and her friend having dialogue, but it’s quiet, just like everything else in the film. It’s tantalizing, a hint for more. There’s also some confusing plot points that take a bit more reading and time to figure out, but it’s worth it at the end of the day. I recommend this film just to see it, but I wouldn’t invest in it. American friends, it’s on Netflix!
