The saying that ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ proved its veracity once more during this lockdown. First, it was the inclusion of my third film Ahaa Re in a coveted list of 25 all-time Great Asian Films about food, prepared by reputed international film magazine-cum-website Asian Movie Pulse in April. The list has textbook food movies like Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, and Juzo Itami’s Tampopo — films that one had studied in film school.
And now, my sophomore film Rongberonger Korhi (Colours of Money) has been archived in AMP’s Recommended list of Asian Movies on their website. This was not in the least expected. They even carried a glowing review of the film. I feel vindicated today, though I am not new to this. It had happened with my debut Hrid Majharey too.
I watched Rongberonger Korhi again. My mind went back to those heady days of the film being commissioned by my producers at Camellia, Rupa Datta and N.R. Datta, the coming on board of Aparna Sen as our mentor, the team formation, the casting, and so on and so forth. I started wondering, what would be the things I would change if I were to create the film today?
I immediately put my mind to this. The result? Read on!
I guess the first thing I would do is explore a little more the psychology of the characters. Even though the film is character-driven without much of a mechanical plot in there, today if I were to rewrite the script, I would delve deeper into the psychology of each character, whether it be Kharaj Mukherjee’s village clerk or Soham-Arunima Ghosh’s tribal couple Ramchandra-Sitarani in the first story, Chiranjeet’s Bijoy, Arunima-Arjun Chakrabarty’s Manda-Mithun in the second, the unnamed city pimp-customer-prostitute played by Dhee Majumder-Ritwick Chakraborty-Rituparna Sengupta in the third, or the village mother-son duo of Rituparna-Rwitobroto Mukherjee in the fourth story, I would further explore the psychology of these characters. And that would automatically alter the performances.
The second improvement would be on the visual design. I would further improve on the set art (though our art director Tanmoy Chakraborty and his creative team did a fabulous job given the prevailing constraints). I would also shoot the film differently. An additional day for each short (for those who are unaware, the film is an anthology of four shorts) would give me the freedom to improve on in both these areas. The visual design we (DoP Sirsha Ray and I) had decided on was the classical way of shot-taking. This was a conscious decision to lucidly narrate the four stories from a third-person PoV, and, also to fit into that tight schedule. Today, I would assign a different visual design for each short, dictated by the demands of the narrative, and depending on the psychology of the characters.
The above would have a telling effect on my third improvement — the edit. It was my first collaboration with Rabiranjan Maitra, and what a blast we had! Today, we would probably have a different film altogether on the edit table. The four shorts would be paced differently, the rhythms would be different, the emotional outcome would hence be different, and each short would have a unique flavour, a singular voice, and be more specific in its look and feel. The ‘truth’ sought for and obtained in each short would be more… ‘genuine’.
The fourth element that would lend itself to an automatic improvement because of the above would be the soundscape, so beautifully created then by Amit Kumar Dutta. This would involve the diegetic and the non-diegetic sound, as well as the background score, by the maverick and my favourite Debojyoti Mishra. I would make the sound effects less cluttered in certain stories… keep the atmosphere more natural. The BGM would be done away with in quite a few sequences and individual scenes. In others, it would be less descriptive. Now when I hear the score, it has an ‘underlining-the- emotion’ attribute to it. I would avoid that. And the overall sound design would have more calm and more silence in it. I would also tone down the pitch of the narration by Mother Earth (performed by the gem of an actor Anashua Majumdar), a little bit. Anashuadi did an absolutely fabulous job, and I remember Rinadi (Aparna Sen) had particularly loved it.
And, finally, I would use better shots of the rotating earth and the time-lapse videos of the stars. Because of copyright issues, we could not use a lot of what was available on the Net, and the copyright-free ones did not always meet my requirements. Today, however, there would be more options of free videos, and I would improve on that.
The year was 2016 when I had started working on Rongberonger Korhi. There were 40 locations in all, and we shot the film in 10 days. Now we’re in this existential crisis fighting the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. There are certain things that we change in our lives and certain things that we don’t or can’t. If I were to recreate the film today, these are the things I would not touch — they’ll remain the same now as they were back then — my loving mentor, my wonderful producers, my talented cast and my committed and very able crew. Without them, I would not venture to make the film again!
