Aparna Sen's 15 Park Avenue is a film about nature of reality.
A young delusional girl, prone to imagining things and hearing voices, possibly out of sheer boredom, is taken to be schizophrenic by her educated father and control-freak educated elder step-sister. Controlled, pitied and treated like an invalid (even if out of love and affection), she has ghost of a chance to develop as a normal person. When a boy offers to marry her, her father and step-sister passionately try to convince him against taking such a step. A traumatic experience, caused primarily due to her sheltered existence, finally takes her across the line of no return, and she lives full time in a delusional world of her own.
The family and society around her are intolerant of her delusions,and want to suppress them with medicines, electric shock therapy, anything, even though they all have delusions of one kind or other of their own.
Her mother doesn't see the irony in allowing a ghost-buster to treat her of the delusions. Her step-sister is a professor of Physics, teaching among other things Quantum Mechanics, a subject in which a stream of experts accept parallel multi-universes and many more dimensions in space than the 3 we see. A friend recounts with admiration an experience with a holy person claiming to hear hallucinatory voices. Far away, George W Bush has real or fake delusions of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and is allowed to invade Iraq.
As some viewers have already pointed out, Aparna Sen shied away from attacking the mother of all delusions -mainstream religions, which is a pity.
In other words, accepted reality is what a majority or an influential minority believe in. That's been the case since the beginning, and lot more powerful people than Mithali in the film, among them Bruno and Galileo, have suffered as a consequence.
The film's controversial and difficult ending was necessary to show it's a film about nature of reality, and not the case study of a schizophrenic girl.
All the cast have given great performances, but Shabana Azmi and Konkona Sen Sharma have excelled. Aparna Sen has produced an outstanding philosophical film.
A young delusional girl, prone to imagining things and hearing voices, possibly out of sheer boredom, is taken to be schizophrenic by her educated father and control-freak educated elder step-sister. Controlled, pitied and treated like an invalid (even if out of love and affection), she has ghost of a chance to develop as a normal person. When a boy offers to marry her, her father and step-sister passionately try to convince him against taking such a step. A traumatic experience, caused primarily due to her sheltered existence, finally takes her across the line of no return, and she lives full time in a delusional world of her own.
The family and society around her are intolerant of her delusions,and want to suppress them with medicines, electric shock therapy, anything, even though they all have delusions of one kind or other of their own.
Her mother doesn't see the irony in allowing a ghost-buster to treat her of the delusions. Her step-sister is a professor of Physics, teaching among other things Quantum Mechanics, a subject in which a stream of experts accept parallel multi-universes and many more dimensions in space than the 3 we see. A friend recounts with admiration an experience with a holy person claiming to hear hallucinatory voices. Far away, George W Bush has real or fake delusions of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and is allowed to invade Iraq.
As some viewers have already pointed out, Aparna Sen shied away from attacking the mother of all delusions -mainstream religions, which is a pity.
In other words, accepted reality is what a majority or an influential minority believe in. That's been the case since the beginning, and lot more powerful people than Mithali in the film, among them Bruno and Galileo, have suffered as a consequence.
The film's controversial and difficult ending was necessary to show it's a film about nature of reality, and not the case study of a schizophrenic girl.
All the cast have given great performances, but Shabana Azmi and Konkona Sen Sharma have excelled. Aparna Sen has produced an outstanding philosophical film.