Film: 'Shob Charitro Kalponik'; Cast: Bipasha Basu, Prasenjeet Chatterjee, Jisshu Sengupta; Writer-Director: Rituparno Ghosh; Ratings: ****

Very often in life the people whom we love the most let us down the most. In 'Shob Charitro Kalponik', sensitive storytelling wizard from Kolkata Rituparno Ghosh takes his protagonist, the unhappy wife Radhika, on a journey that opens doors within her heart that she would have liked to remain closed.

Ghosh occupies the two mutually exclusive yet inseparable world of art and reality with a fluency and effortlessness that takes his characters far beyond the cartel of prototypes.

We see Radhika, trapped in state of marital unhappiness, as not just woman struggling to keep her home and heart together, but also as an individual trying find her identity against odds that are created mainly in her own mind.

Orson Welles style, the 'real' personality of the dead poet emerges in flashbacks that are more cursory than comprehensive. But when has life ever offered complete solutions to the riddle of marriage that has puzzled man and woman for centuries?

Echoes that reach back to the very core of humanity reverberate across this miniature masterpiece on marriage and fidelity. Ghosh's forte is the unspoken word. The bonds that form between Radhika and her maid and between Radhika and her colleague (Jisshu Sengupta) rely on resonances beyond the rhetoric of interactive art. The director creates room in cramped spaces.

Most of Ghosh's narrative are vibrant vignettes behind closed doors done up in deep shades of anguish and bitterness. The progression towards a mellower comprehension of the tenderness behind the seeming spousal insensitivity begins after the husband's death. The irony of loving a spouse after he's gone is far from lost.

Radhika's tormented understanding of her dead poet husband's inner world is laced with luminous moments of revelatory tragedy, leading up to a finale that's surreal and introspective. The hallucinogenic conclusion where Radhika enters her husband's poetic world is charming, controlled and yet frightening.