Rituparno Ghosh

On a sultry Friday morning, Rituparno Ghosh sits curled up in a cushioned chair at his Anwar Shah Road residence. Khela, the film he had shot two-and-a-half years ago, releases three weeks later (July 11). The film-within-a-film starring Prosenjit, Manisha Koirala and Raima Sen marks a departure for the director known for his intense women-centric films.

A t2 chat...

Why has Khela taken so long to release?

Initially Pritish Nandy Communications was involved with the film but later they realised they wouldn’t benefit from distributing a Bengali film. Then, Saregama came in and it was a different set-up. Soon after, I got busy with Dosar and then other films started happening. In a way, The Last Lear is the only film that I have done the way I used to do my films before — finishing a film and then moving on to another.

Khela is very different from the kind of films you make...

Yes, since I had been making very intense and serious films for quite some time, I thought of making something very entertaining. Khela is my first film which has a male protagonist and a child actor, and where the women characters are subsidiary.

There was a self-consciousness about Hirer Angti as it was my first film and, as it happens with all first-time filmmakers, I had to prove myself.... Khela is a film about innocence and I am really fortunate to have got a child actor like Akashneel Dutta Mukherjee. I think Khela will evoke the kind of excitement we have while watching the child artistes in Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath.

Prosenjit is a filmmaker here...

I have used a filmmaker character in several films — Bariwali, The Last Lear and Abohoman. And in each of these, the selfishness of the artiste in the filmmaker comes to the fore. But Khela deals with the child in the filmmaker. Here we are not getting into the complexities of the other aspects of his profession.

In the film, Manisha wants a baby but Prosenjit is not ready to take the responsibility of a child because he feels it will compromise the artiste in him. But once he starts working with a child actor in his film, he starts bonding.... I had written Khela soon after Hirer Angti, so that would be in 1991-92. I had written a lot of scripts back then. Shob Charitra Kalponik was written just after Unishe April.

Why did you cast Manisha as Prosenjit’s wife?

Manisha wanted to do this film for a long time. There’s something of the eternal Indian woman in Manisha that’s there in some of her earlier movies. I was sure she would be able to recreate that in Khela. Besides, she is such a wonderful girl to work with. Manisha told me she was very happy working with me and the other time she was as happy was while working with Mani Ratnam in Bombay and Dil Se.... Raima (Sen) has a good role (a costume designer); it’s bigger than Manisha’s.

You have made four films on the trot — Sunglass, The Last Lear, Shob Charitra Kalponik and Abohoman. Don’t you need space and time for creativity?

I am through with the creative process long before hitting the floors. Shooting for me is a very mechanical thing. I draw up the schedule, chalk out the scenes and so on. I don’t think I would have done any better if I had more time. And since I have a background in advertising, I have the discipline to deliver the goods on time.

What irks me is the budget constraint. If my logistics had been better, I think some films would have turned out better. For instance, while we were doing the outdoor shoot of The Last Lear in Mussoorie, we had to hunt for a secluded spot so that Amitda (Amitabh Bachchan) wouldn’t be hounded, which ended up creating a lot of complications.

Have you spent the same amount of time and energy on each of these films?

No, as a filmmaker I was more involved with Shob Charitra Kalponik (starring Bipasha Basu, Prosenjit and Jisshu Sengupta). This film has magic realism; it needed a different cinematic language. Besides, my cinematographer Abhik (Mukhopadhyay) got busy with another project. When he is around, I don’t bother about the camera. This time there was Soumik Haldar and since he was new I had to visually approach the film. This is what I learnt while making Shob Charitra Kalponik. All my films have taught me something or the other.

What did Khela teach you?

Khela taught me how to really understand a child. I was dealing with a child, who was also an artiste. Treating a child as an adult does not always work. Neither does it work if you just babytalk. There has to be something in between. I got Akashneel to shave his head for the sake of the film and later when I shaved mine, just because I wanted to, I felt I should have done it then. It may have helped Akashneel feel more comfortable.

How do you go about choosing your subjects?

I like to choose topics that deal with the various chambers of people’s minds. I have never thought of changing that. But yes, I have thought of changing the way I tell a story.

After Antarmahal and Dosar, I felt the Bengali middle-class audience, which used to love my films, had been hurt by the “bold, intimate” scenes in these films. I felt I had disrespected their sensibility by my arrogance, by thinking I had to keep such scenes in my films. There’s even talk of condoms in Dosar.... I realised they were not being prudish but that this kind of reaction is part of our etiquette. I wanted to get them back with Khela. I think I should keep this in mind and I have decided to warn my audience when I make a film which is not for family viewing.

In hindsight, do you feel you would have made Antarmahal and Dosar differently?

No, of course not. I still miss some nudity (scenes that he had planned) in Antarmahal. Not in actuality but in effect.... You know it’s very difficult to create that scene in Apur Sansar where Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) picks up Aparna’s (Sharmila Tagore) hairpin. There’s so much eroticism, so much sensuousness in it but it doesn’t offend anyone’s sensibility.

Ritu’s next four

The Last Lear: Amitabh Bachchan plays theatre actor Harish Mishra who decides to act in a movie after much persuasion from filmmaker Arjun Rampal. Preity Zinta plays a film actress.

 

 

Sunglass: Homemaker Konkona Sensharma comes across a sunglass with magical powers. Madhavan plays her husband in the Hindi film; Tota Roy Chowdhury replaces him in the Bengali version. Jaya Bachchan plays Konkona’s mother.

 

 

Shob Charitra Kalponik: It’s Bipasha Basu’s return to roots. She’s an NRI who comes to Calcutta after her husband’s (Prosenjit) death and bonds with a photographer (Jisshu).

 

 

 

Abohoman: Dipankar De plays a film director who has a relationship with a struggling actress. The film also features Mamata Shankar, Jisshu, Riya Sen and Ananya.