15 Park Avenue

Hey in case, if you haven’t watched this movie & you intend to watch the same, then I would suggest not to go ahead with reading this post as this post reveals the story of the movie & I know many people don’t like to know the story of the movie before watching the same. I am neither a movie reviewer nor a psychiatrist or so but then too thought to write about this movie as this movie relates very well to a normal human psychology.

Watched this movie last weekend. Amazing movie & excellent acting by everyone!!! Kudos to Aparna Sen for making such a remarkable movie. Well, she has always made great movies but I really loved this movie for everything except the end. It was an open-ended movie left to the imagination of the viewers. Frankly speaking I was so deeply engrossed in the movie & was so eager to know the reality that I desperately wanted to know the end. My eagerness for a finite end resulted in some disappointment when I realized that it was an open ended movie. After all what happened to Mitthi???

This movie is about a young girl Mitthi (Konkana Sen) who is schizophrenic & lives in her own imaginative world. Her elder sister Anjali (Shabana Azmi) is a professor & divorcee. She has put her life on hold to take care of Mitthi & her mother (Waheeda Rehman). Mitthi was in love with Jojo/Joydeep (Rahul Bose) who wanted to marry her & even after several warnings from Anjali to Jojo about Mitthi’s psychological illness, both went ahead and got engaged too. After engagement, Mitthi went ahead with an official journalism assignment to some small town & was gang-raped by some political goons. Jojo left Mitthi after that as he realized that he wasn’t having the courage to spend his whole life with a girl like Mitthi. Mitthi became further depressed & her schizophrenia got aggravated. She hallucinated about being married to Jojo with five kids & living in her house “15 Park Avenue”. She is constantly looking for this address, an address that doesn’t exist at all. After few years, Jojo meets Mitthi in Bhutan where Anjali has taken Mitthi & her mother for a break & Jojo has also come with his wife Laxmi (Shefali Chaya) and two kids. He starts suffering from guilt consciousness for deserting Mitthi at the time when she needed her the most. He decides to help Mitthi find her house at 15 Park Avenue. They are searching for this house & then suddenly Mitthi disappears. The other scene shows that she has found her house & family at 15 Park Avenue. The movie ends with a scene where Anjali, Jojo & Karan (Mitthi’s Doctor) are looking for Mitthi & 15 Park Avenue…

Believe me, some of the scenes keep coming to my mind especially Mitthi’s rape because of the way they have been shown. So true, so real & so raw. The rapists after raping her repeatedly left her callously in the corridor & the way they threw her sandals over her…… it gives me goose bumps to even think of that scene. The way Konkana Sen hallucinates…it doesn’t appear even once that she is acting on screen & that she is not someone real. The end was left open to the viewer’s imagination. Well, thought & read of many interpretations to that end but none seemed to be convincing enough.

Personally by my own analysis I interpret the end as following:
I think if hallucination is the attribute of schizophrenia then, all of us are schizophrenic in nature to some extent as we all imagine for certain things. We all have got an imaginary world, which is different from our real world, & in that imaginary world we hallucinate to do such things, which we want to do but might not be able to do in our real world. Sometimes, our desire for that imaginary life becomes so dominant or overriding that we start believing in that imaginary world & forget our real existence. Maybe sometimes we want to run away from our real existence & desperately want to have a life as that of our imaginative world and if we aren’t able to do so, then for our personal satisfaction we start imagining that life strongly so much so that we forget our real entity. When this desire or urge of imaginary life supersedes the reality then it might be known as psychological illness “schizophrenia”. The same happened in that movie. Mitthi is schizophrenic & hallucinates about her married life with Jojo at 15 Park Avenue as she was madly in love with Jojo & desperately wanted to get married to her. When it didn’t happen, her dormant schizophrenic trait dominated her reality & she started believing in a house at “15 Park Avenue” which was hers & Jojo’s house & where she was happily living with her kids. The last scene shows that she has suddenly disappeared & now Jojo, Anjali & Karan are so desperate to find her that even they start believing that she has gone to some house at “15 Park Avenue” & they have also started to ask from everybody around the same address, an address that doesn’t exist at all!!! Where she disappeared is still incomprehensible to me…

Hey wait, wait…why am I imagining the end!!! Is it because I am so desperate to know the end that I have myself started to imagine an end & believe in that…Oh my god, some dormant trait of schizophrenia or what…Ha Ha Ha…Hey friends, do let me know if you can think of any other interpretation to the end of this movie!!!
UPDATE: Yesterday someone told me that the actual interpretation of the movie was that it was Anjali (Shabana Azmi) who was schizophrenic & not Mitthi. Is it really true??? Oh my God, if this is true then I think that I haven't understood the movie at all...