Featuring Disha Bhattacharyya and Abhijit Das, the film explores how loneliness often drives one to conceal one's vulnerabilities.
Secrets review: Haunting metaphorical depiction of alienation
Cinestaan Rating
Release Date: 25 Dec 2020 / 9min
Roushni Sarkar | Kolkata, 22 May 2021 3:45 IST
Independent filmmaker Souradeep Datta has crafted another metaphorical narrative with his short film Secrets. His previous film, Colour Palette of a Soldier, dealt with the trauma experienced by members of the armed forces.
Featuring Disha Bhattacharyya and Abhijit Das, the film explores how loneliness often drives one to conceal one's vulnerabilities and bury embarrassing memories.
However, lying dormant in our subconscious, they manifest as secrets that we not only refuse to share with others but also find hard to come to terms with ourselves. Like Datta's previous project, Secrets is a silent film where the background score emphasizes the thoughts of the characters.
The film opens with a young woman (Bhattacharyya) placing a suitcase on a freshly made bed in a cottage in a snowy area. But before one gets the impression that Secrets is a vacation story, the tense background score indicates something is amiss. The woman begins unloading the suitcase and eventually stops after finding a flower pressed between the pages of a book. The eerie background score then comes to a halt. We realise that the woman, instead of soaking in her beautiful natural surroundings, is sitting indoors, brooding on the flower.
Eventually, she breaks out of the spell. With no time to adore the vast snowy expanse around her, she begins to search for a place to bury the flower. However, it continues to haunt her. The visuals suggest that she had attempted to bury the flower at several locales but in vain. Eventually, when she finds it back between the pages, she packs her suitcase again and leaves in panic for another destination.
In order to run away from her own vulnerabilities, she travels from one place to another, hoping to bury her memories.
The choice of visuals and the background score not only make the woman's loneliness profound but also impose a sense of cold stillness. However, a lot is conveyed within a short span.
In the end, a man with a suitcase appears in another cottage after the girl leaves, carrying a similar burden, which suggests that countless souls are going through a similar struggle. As the characters never connect, the ending sequence alludes to the prevalent phenomenon of psychological alienation.
Secrets is being streamed on the online platform MovieSaints.