After nearly two decades away from Bengali cinema, veteran actress Sharmila Tagore makes a striking comeback in Puratawn, delivering a deeply moving performance as an elderly woman grappling with the slow erosion of her memory. Her character is tenderly portrayed as someone clinging to the fragments of a life once full, yet slipping away moment by moment.
In one particularly emotional scene, the character wrongly accuses her loyal house help of stealing her jewelry. When the missing piece turns up shortly after — safely tucked away in her own cupboard — her daughter Ritika (Rituparna Sengupta) confronts her, only to be met with a hauntingly blank look, as if her mind simply refuses to process the mistake. Tagore captures this fragile moment with astonishing subtlety, showing the quiet confusion of a mind at odds with reality.
Rather than charting her decline through a clinical lens, the film centers on the bond between mother and daughter. Ritika, herself weighed down by the cracks in her own marriage to Rajeev (Indraneil Sengupta), returns to her childhood home in Konnagar, only to find her mother adrift in memories and struggling to hold on to the present.
Throughout the story, Tagore’s character is depicted teetering between calm, routine moments and episodes of frantic searching — whether it’s for her old wedding jewelry, forgotten letters, or faded photographs. The film opens with a single-shot sequence that follows the house help, Heera (played with quiet strength by Brishti Ray), as she scours the house in the middle of a storm, finally discovering the elderly woman standing silently, waiting for her daughter’s arrival.
The film also delicately unpacks Ritika’s own journey — her relationship with Rajeev is drawn through understated flashbacks, mapping out how love and understanding evolve with time. Their parallel storyline sometimes slows the pace, but Rituparna brings depth and warmth to Ritika, especially in her quiet exchanges with Indraneil during everyday domestic moments.
