Is Manisha Koirala’s the face of the new Charulata? Remakes of great movies, especially one as iconic as Charulata, which Satyajit Ray apparently considered his best film, invariably turn out to be disappointing. However, now that Manisha has been offered the part of the lonely wife that was executed to near perfection by Madhabi Mukherjee in the original in 1964, it is hard to think of anyone who would be better suited to the challenge.

There is about Manisha’s face a haunting, wistful quality that audiences first glimpsed when the wind lifted her veil in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay. That was back in 1994. One instinctively senses she has been through much pain and suffering since then in her personal life but, in a strange way, these experiences may have added to her ethereal beauty.

“I am more peaceful, mature. I must be happier,” she remarks.

We are in the cafe of the Cannes Market, snatching an interview in between the many films that Manisha is seeing. Her face is scrubbed clean and she wears almost no make-up but that only serves to highlight her natural good looks. When she laughs, which she does often, she could almost be the pretty schoolteacher living next door rather than one of the most gifted actresses in Indian cinema.

She is either superstitious or wise enough not to disclose too much about the Charulata remake prematurely, except to say: “It is an American-based production house.” The remake will be in English.

“They approached me,” she says. “I said, of course, I would love to do it. It is a Tagore story.”

She is confident that the film company in question “seems to be serious, otherwise normal people would not pick up a subject like Charulata. I loved the movie.”

She acquired her love of Ray from her Nepali politician father, Prakash Koirala. “Right now he is in Bombay but (normally) he lives in Nepal. I have grown up listening to him talk about Satyajit Ray. My father does not consider anybody else a filmmaker.”

Madhabi Mukherjee on Manisha being Charulata...

Charulata-r remake hobe? I hope they do it properly. I have never seen any Manisha Koirala film but I would expect her to do justice to the role. Actually, a lot depends on the director. Let me make something clear. There can’t be another Satyajit Ray, neither can there be a second Rabindranath Tagore. Which director of present times can match up to Satyajit Ray’s sensibility as a filmmaker? Bansi Chandragupta had done the sets and Subrata Mitra was the cameraman for Charulata. I can’t imagine Charulata on screen without them.

There is only one condition she has stipulated before she will play Charulata. She remembers Madhabi Mukherjee’s Charulata had opposite her two convincing actors in Soumitra Chatterjee and Shailen Mukherjee to play the roles of her brother-in-law, Amal, and husband, Bhupati Dutta, respectively, when Ray adapted Tagore’s novella, Nastoneer (The Broken Nest).

“When somebody offered me a film like that, I said, of course, I will do it but the only thing was that I wanted the male characters to be extremely good actors,” explains Manisha. “You have to be sensitive to take any of these subjects, so let’s see...”

Since Bombay, with some notable exceptions such as Khamoshi: The Musical in 1996, Dil Se in 1998 and Company in 2001, the roles she has been offered appear not always to have matched her abilities.

She is honest enough to admit she often made wrong choices. “I would accept it was my own doing in the sense I was overworked at one time and I lost that passion. Slowly that lack of interest shows in the films and when I chose, I made some wrong decisions.”

She goes on: “Doing some average films or below average films was my doing, my mistake.”

This is the third time I am seeing Manisha at Cannes and it is apparent she seems more relaxed.

She nods in agreement. “Both the times I have been here before, I was not in a very happy place. What happened was that I got a long break from movies and I got a lot of time to think. Then I started realising that I really am passionate about films and I love acting so it would not be right if I did not utilise what I love doing.”

Manisha at Cannes. Picture by Amit Roy

She has turned in a convincing performance playing an older prostitute whose charms are fading in Deepti Naval’s directorial debut Do Paise Ki Dhoop, Chaar Aane Ki Baarish (Two Paise for Sunshine, Four Annas for Rain), which had one market screening at Cannes.

“When Deepti was narrating the subject to me, I said I would be glad to play this role though the character is meant to be ugly, she is meant to be getting old and all wrinkled up, really a street walker. This is a challenge for an actor to portray as realistically as possible. I loved every day on this film, like I enjoyed with great directors I have worked with in the past.”

She seems less enthusiastic about Escape from Taliban, a 2003 film based on the real life journey from Calcutta to Afghanistan by Sushmita Banerjee who had eloped with her Afghan husband Janbaaz Khan.

The Hindi version of the movie is 120 minutes but Sanjay Seksaria, of Mumbai-based Media Movers, who was marketing a 93-minute long English language version of the film on DVD in Cannes, told me he had failed to persuade Manisha to address a press conference to promote the movie. Manisha says: “I have now decided I will only work when I am completely passionate about a film.”

THE VIEWER

Unlike other Indian actresses who grace Cannes only with their presence, Manisha has not been wasting her time just socialising at the world’s premier film festival. She did attend the parties hosted by the Hindujas and Vijay Mallya, and also put in an appearance at Ashok Amritraj’s drinks reception — among those present was Subhash Ghai who gave Manisha her break in Saudagar in 1991. Her focus, though, has been on the cinematic riches Cannes has to offer.

“I have seen many films in Cannes,” she tells me.

She disagreed with people who had dismissed Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, about the love affair between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, to be “nice but slow”. Her view is that “every narration has a different pace to it. So if it was slow I did not mind at all. I think it was beautiful poetry, it was well performed. The actress (Abbie Cornish who plays Fanny Brawne) has done such beautiful work.”

She had also enjoyed Ken Loach’s “feel-good movie” Looking for Eric, which features the former French footballer Eric Cantona.

She was less impressed with Independenica, a Filipino drama, which she considered “experimental but without much to say”.

She was moved most of all by a Korean film, Mother, about the struggle of a woman to free a mentally handicapped son wrongly framed for murder. “I loved the screenplay in that. One could not predict which way the director was taking you. The unpredictability of the screenplay was fabulous. I am looking for good screenplays to come my way.”

We discuss Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, which stars Penelope Cruz who has acted in three previous films made by the Spanish director.

Some people think that Manisha resembles Cruz. There was one evening when Manisha came on board the yacht on which the industrialist H.S. Narula and his wife Surina were taking their friends from Cannes to the island of St Marguerite for Vijay Mallya’s party. With her short hair styled in a particular way, some noticed Manisha’s resemblance to Cruz was more than passing. As twilight turned to evening on the Mediterranean and the yacht slipped through the waters, Manisha looked exquisite, bathed in the soft light.

Could she emulate Cruz on screen? “Easily, definitely I could,” responds Manisha, who adds she could do even better. “I am an actor, maybe more.”

Then she breaks into pleasant laughter. “That’s being vain, sorry.”

“I think she is beautiful and she is a wonderful actress,” she says of Cruz. “I am jealous of the fact that she is Almodovar’s muse. She is in most of his films. According to me, he is God.”

THE READER

Manisha grew up in Varanasi, where she says she was born and where she attended a Hindi-medium school. From her grandmother she learnt classic dancing, including Bharatanatyam. Later, she learnt English at the Army Public School in Delhi. “I studied till Class XII and after that I got into films.”

With passing time and Bollywood’s insatiable hunger for younger women, “definitely it gets difficult (getting leading roles) when people are making films for someone in their twenties. Neither do I fit into those roles, nor am I keen to do those. When my age was (theirs), I did them and I am done with that. Now I want to be able to work on something that I have not done before.”

“I should be able to attract great films, great roles with directors who make really interesting films,” she says. “Today we are making films like that in India. So many great talents I have met. I see a huge scope in India and I see a huge scope in the western world as well because the world is becoming smaller and smaller. I am sure there would be potential for me to work in the West as well as back home in India.”

She has retained a fondness for reading since her childhood days.

She mentions two books she finished recently, Osho’s Body Mind Balancing and The Last Lecture. The latter is by the late Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and compiled his farewell message to his young children into a book.

Manisha recommends the second book in which the author offers this observation: “I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can’t get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: ‘What kind of person should you try to be?’”

Which raises the question: What kind of person would Manisha like to be? Sometimes if a passage in a book strikes a chord with her, she will mark it. “After a period of, say, five or 10 years, I would like to read those things again to see what my process of growth has been, where my soul has been touched.”

Such qualities could make her the perfect Charulata.

Is Manisha the right choice to play Charulata? Tell t2@abpmail.com