The Padma Boatman (1993)

Let me be upfront: I wanted to love this one. My A-Z World Movie Tour hit Bangladesh with The Padma Boatman, and from the very first frame I could see the craft on screen. Visually, this film is genuinely stunning. The way it uses colour and light, the river, the landscapes, the faces, it all has a kind of dreamy quality that had me thinking I was in for something special. There are individual scenes here that are beautiful in a way that would make any photographer weep with envy. That part, I have no complaints about whatsoever.

But here's the thing. Looking great and being watchable are two very different things, and The Padma Boatman put up a fight every step of the way when it came to the latter.

My biggest problem was simply keeping track of what was going on. Within the first half hour I'd lost the thread of who was married to whom, whose sister was causing a stir and why, and what any given argument was really about. Now, I'll hold my hand up: part of that might well be a cultural gap on my end. I'm watching a film from a tradition I'm not particularly familiar with, and I'm sure there's context I'm missing. But even allowing for that, the story felt less like a narrative and more like a series of conversations that didn't quite connect to each other. I kept waiting for the pieces to click into place, and they never really did.

What made it worse was something I really wasn't expecting: a disconnect between what characters were saying and how they were saying it. The body language and tone of voice frequently didn't seem to match the words coming out of people's mouths, and that threw me completely. Whether that's a translation issue, a stylistic choice I wasn't picking up on, or something to do with the performance style of the era, I genuinely couldn't tell you. But it meant I was second-guessing every scene, wondering if I was reading the emotional register correctly. It's exhausting when you can't trust your own instincts watching a film.

There's a part of me that wonders if this is the kind of film that rewards a second viewing with a bit more preparation, maybe reading up on the source material beforehand, getting a clearer sense of the relationships before the film starts. It reminds me a little of my experience with A Throw of Dice (1929), another South Asian film where the visual language was doing something genuinely special even when I was struggling to hold everything else together.

But as it stands, sat watching it cold, I couldn't get into it. And I tried. I really did. The cinematography kept pulling me back in every time my attention started to wander, like a beautiful painting on the wall of a room where you can't quite hear what anyone is saying. You keep glancing over at it, but you're still not really part of the conversation.

Call me an uncultured swine if you like. I can take it. There's clearly something here worth seeing if you come to it with the right knowledge or patience. The images alone deserve better than my two-star rating might suggest. But a film has to work as a whole experience, and this one just didn't land for me, no matter how gorgeous it looked doing it.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1993  | Watched: 2025-05-28

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