Mr. And Mrs. Iyer is a simple road movie that touches on a number of issues that is both beautifully acted and directed with skill and sensitivity rarely falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Aparna Sen’s film focuses on a long bus journey from one end of India to Calcutta which normally would be just laborious and uncomfortable affair, but given the backdrop of the ghastly riots in Gujarat the journey becomes one fraught with the menacing shadow of death.

In the opening scenes the viewer is introduced bit by bit to the occupants of the bus that the journey is to take place in. The focus of attention is Meenakshi Iyer, a proud Tamil of the highest caste who is travelling with her infant on her way to Calcutta where she hopes to reunite with her husband and family. A shy but vivacious girl who is barely out of school herself is struggling to keep her baby quiet while the director subtly shifts his attention to each occupant of the bus so that we become familiar with each of the occupants and get to know “where they are coming from”. Aparna Sen has deliberately gone out of her way to make sure that most “types” of Indians are represented on her bus.

The majority are Hindu middle class folk going for a holiday or to meet their loved ones or for some work but you also have a quiet elderly Muslim couple, several loud partying kids having a bit of a tuneless sing-a-long session or three, a handicapped child with his sad looking mother, a couple of Sikhs discussing an impending wedding in the family (what’s new!) and there is also a young British returned Photographer of Bengali origin who also happens to be a Muslim, there is also a Jew but we find that out a little bit later on. The journey progresses as most such journeys do….screaming babies, rowdy teenagers all fall asleep by the third hour into the journey. The petite Mrs. Iyer, struggling to feed her child asks the photographer to give her a hand and they share a friendly chat along the way for a while.

Then terror strikes when the bus is held up at a road block due to communal riots in a town lying ahead and the flames of hatred draw ever nearer to the passengers of the stalled bus. None of the inhabitants quite realize what horror they are confronted with until it finally stares them in the face. A pack of wild dog like fanatics enter the bus baying for Muslim blood in revenge for some flare up in the town earlier on. In a scene charged with tension and terror, the fanatics ask each of the passengers their identity by asking their names one by one…asking passengers to prove that they were Hindu or else. The utterly benign, doddering old couple are pointed out by a squeal of a passenger and the pack of wild animals turns to them, hatred gleaming in their wild eyes. The oldie is asked his name offers the truth which is enough to have him and his wife escorted out of the bus for an early execution. Suddenly the horror of the situation dawns on the passengers but self preservation takes precedent and cowering is the order of the day.

Now the wild pack turns their attention to others in the bus, forcing men in the most barbaric ways to prove that they aren’t Muslims. The young Mrs. Iyer, not normally one to associate with anything Muslim (God forbid) is stunned by the fate of the elderly couple and though her kind has been conditioned to be mistrusting of Muslims, she is stirred to the extent that she is able to lie to the murderous pack of fanatics that the person in the seat next to her is Mr. Iyer, her husband, a fine upright Brahmin like herself. It’s as revolting a scene as it is gut wrenchingly sad but totally effective in its depiction of the horrors that the situation contained. To think that humans can turn on each other with such savagery and be so utterly absorbed with hatred is truly shocking, and worse to think that this can occur in times of supposed enlightenment and education.

For the next hour or so the film shifts focus to the strange bond that starts to comes to exist between Mrs. Iyer and the man she has saved and who in return she is slowly finding herself more and more dependent on and also fascinated by – once she allows her inbuilt prejudices to be forgotten for a moment or two. The journey is fraught with danger at each corner and each winding road a potential death trap. Surely the other passengers will soon find out that the photographer is not infact Mr. Iyer but one of them. His accent might give him away, his manner, his uttering a word here or there by mistake in the wrong language, his eating meat…Anything could give the game away and Raja the muslim photographer slaughtered in an instant and thrown into the river to rot.

The tension remains till the closing moments and is effectively handled by the director as is the subtle relationship that develops between the young Tamil wife and the Photographer. The journey is an awakening for her especially and even if Raja lives or dies, or even if she never sets eyes on him after the journey, his influence on her is to be a lasting one and there is a feeling that at least she certainly isn’t going to allow her child to turn into a bigot that so many of her brethren have turned into, educated or not.

Aparna Sen has come up with a winner with this beautifully simple yet very complex tale. Simple in that it is basically a relationship based road movie but complex because it attempts to deal with and touch upon a bunch of relevant issues including prejudice, the communal situation in India, and how we can be so supposedly educated but still caught up in customs and beliefs that are archaic and dangerously myopic. This is a relevant and important film that has loads to say and says it while entertaining and even educating its audience.

Sen was an outstanding actor in her day and now she is proving no less of a perfectionist when it comes to calling the shots behind the camera lens – very impressive indeed. Of the actors the elderly Muslim couple are beautifully portrayed and Rahul Bose as the photographer is fair but it is Konkona Sen Sharma (the director’s daughter) who shines turning in an endearing and memorable performance. If one was to be critical, one could say that perhaps the film isn’t quite as riveting in the second half as it is in the first and that Aparna Sen allows her self to drift into almost corny emotional territory on occasion rather than maintaining her focus.

When the film shifts its focus to the relationship rather than the politics, it falters momentarily but that would be nitpicking for the sake of it, and in any case the glorious music of Ustad Zakir Hussain more than compensates for any lull in proceedings though the English-Hindi fusion number is truly horrible. Also, the opening montage of newspaper clippings looked amateurishly tacked on for shock effect - it doesn't work.

Western critics have found the film woefully lacking in subtlety and one wouldn’t argue against their expert opinions yet it must not be very easy for many of them to be overly familiar with the exaggerated emotional psyche of the South Asian nor with the reality of the political scenario that exists in India today beyond a superficial understanding developed watching such beacons of culture and history such as Fox News, CNN or indeed reading “sexy” dispatches from brilliant budding star journalists of the New York Times. The wailing of a South Asian woman in bereavement is a far cry from the way a woman might express herself in another culture, in another land - and yet for one to call the other unsubtle doesn't mean that it is no less real.