Pritha Chakraborty’s second feature, Phera (Return), traces the tentative repair of a fractured relationship, exploring how the demands of contemporary life can erode intimacy and turn bonds of affection into distances that appear impossible to overcome.
Pannalal (Sanjay Mishra) lives alone in his crumbling ancestral home in the small town of Kalindipur in West Bengal. His days are shaped by simple routines, the companionship of his close friend Bonku, his dog Kolaboti, and his involvement with the local football club. Meanwhile, his son Palash (Ritwick Chakraborty) works for a marketing company in the city and lives in a rented apartment, diligently saving money to purchase a flat of his own. When pieces of plaster begin falling from the ceiling of Pannalal’s deteriorating house, Palash is compelled to bring his father to the city, as a temporary arrangement. Forced to share the same roof after years of living apart, father and son find themselves negotiating an emotional distance that has widened imperceptibly over time…
With Phera, Chakraborty continues her keen observation of human behaviour and the ways relationships are reshaped by circumstance. It is a concern that was also central to her debut feature, Mukherjee Dar Bou (2019). If that film was firmly rooted in a woman’s world, Phera turns its attention to male vulnerability, exploring it with the same empathy and delicacy. She demonstrates a perceptive understanding of how affection, resentment and regret cohabit within family relationships. Rather than relying on grand revelations, the film’s dramatic texture is derived from seemingly inconsequential moments, and it allows character and behaviour to emerge organically rather than relying on overt conflict or a tightly engineered plot.
The film’s governing motif is that of shelter, both as a physical necessity and an emotional condition. Pannalal’s ancestral home is literally falling apart, yet he prefers to spend his remaining years within its crumbling walls. For him, home is inseparable from memory and identity. Palash, by contrast, inhabits a rented apartment in the city and channels his aspirations towards purchasing a flat of his own, treating home as a marker of security and achievement. This contrast reflects a generational shift in how belonging is understood: for the father, it is rooted in the past; for the son, it lies in a future yet to be attained. Snigdha keeps one room permanently locked, preserving the belongings of her deceased father. Unable to have a final conversation with him before his death, she has transformed the room into a repository of memory and unresolved grief. Here, houses are more than a comfort space, or a roof over one’s head. They become a locus of longing, where disappointment and remembrance both coexist.
The estrangement between father and son is rooted in a lifetime of disappointments and unmet expectations. Once a talented footballer, Pannalal never translated his promise into material security for his family. A failure that continues to shape Palash’s view of him. Their conversations often cut to the heart of these grievances. In one exchange, Pannalal admits that he married under family pressure. The revelation prompts Palash to ask whether he ever had any plans of his own. Pannalal’s retort that what, after all, has planning achieved for Palash is less a defence than a challenge to the certainties of middle-class aspiration. Such moments dissect the emotional fault lines between them, yet they also hint at the possibility of reconciliation. The film suggests that a life cannot be measured solely by ambition fulfilled or wealth accumulated. There are other forms of value, less tangible but no less significant, that only become visible with time.
Nearly everyone in Phera is defined as much by what is missing from their lives as by what remains. Pannalal has lost his wife and appears increasingly willing to loosen his ties even with his extended family. During a lunch gathering, a sharp exchange erupts between him and his brother-in-law over Pannalal’s perceived failures and inability to provide materially for his family. Yet Chakraborty undercuts the confrontation with a characteristic touch of humanity. Shortly afterwards, the two men are seen taking an afternoon nap on adjacent sofas, suggesting that affection often survives where agreement does not. In a Kolkata bar, Pannalal encounters a young waiter whom he once coached as a footballer. The former pupil honours him publicly, requesting the band to acknowledge his mentor. It is a small but affecting moment, revealing that the influence one has on others may outlast more conventional measures of success.
Palash, too, lives with a sense of incompleteness. Still single and on the cusp of turning forty, he briefly entertains the possibility of reconnecting with an ex-girlfriend. But the prospect of reconciliation is immediately undercut by the realities of the present. Snigdha carries her own emotional burden. Separated from her husband, she remains reluctant to sign the divorce papers. Doing so would allow him to move on with his life, but it would also force her to confront an unsettling sense of emptiness. It is to Pannalal that she turns for advice. Having lived through compromise, disappointment and bereavement, he becomes an unlikely source of wisdom, someone who understands that life’s unanswered questions are often easier to endure than they are to resolve.
In his first Bengali-language role, Sanjay Mishra brings the same remarkable ability that has distinguished his finest work, the gift of making ordinary lives appear quietly extraordinary. His Pannalal is a man suspended between the disappointments of the past and the compromises of the present, carrying his regrets with a mixture of stoicism, humour and vulnerability. Ritwick Chakraborty’s Palash serves as an effective counterpoint to Pannalal. Caught between professional aspirations and familial responsibilities, he embodies a generation for whom emotional obligations are often filtered through the pressures of economic survival. As Snigdha, Sohini Sarkar is a woman living in the aftermath of a failed marriage and unresolved grief. She captures this uncertainty with admirable subtlety, making the character more than a narrative facilitator in the father-son relationship. In supporting roles, Subrat Dutta and Priyanka Sarkar provide assured performances.
Subhankar Bhar’s cinematography frequently observes the characters from a measured distance, allowing them to inhabit their surroundings rather than dominate the frame. His compositions pay close attention to spaces – the crumbling ancestral house, the rented apartment, the streets and interiors that shape the characters’ lives – reinforcing the film’s preoccupation with home, memory and belonging. Subhajit Singha’s editing embraces a similarly patient tempo, giving scenes the room to breathe and allowing emotional nuances to emerge gradually though at a runnung time of over two hours, Phera occasionally does feel overextended. Bablu Singha’s art direction feels inhabited rather than arranged, reflecting the histories and emotional states of the characters who occupy them. Amit Kumar Dutta’s sound design subtly enriches the sense of place while Ranajoy Bhattacharjee’s understated score that helps sustain the film’s atmosphere of quiet reflection.
Had the climax been less predictable and conventional, Phera would have been an even richer achievement. Nevertheless, this is a minor blemish on an otherwise humane and finely observed work about family, memory and the distances that separate us. At a time when such intimate, character-driven stories are becoming increasingly rare, Bengali cinema could certainly do with more films of this kind.
Bengali, Drama, Color