“Today my hero and heroine are meeting for the first time... it is all about breaking the ice,” said director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, referring to his Aparajita lead pair Prosenjit and Padmapriya. She is almost a veteran down south having acted in films in four languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam). “I am not doing this film because I want to add Bengali to the list,” Padmapriya laughed. Her grandparents have been in Calcutta, near Deshapriya Park, for seven decades and she remembers coming to the city during her summer vacations. Reasons enough for her to feel confident about being Aparajita.

 

 

Ranjan Palit, known these days as the man who gave 7 Khoon Maaf its look, is the cinematographer for Aparajita, to be shot from end-March in San Francisco and neighbouring locations in the US of A. On Monday afternoon, at a Jhowtala Road address, Palit was clicking stills of Prosenjit and Padmapriya to be used as framed photographs as part of the film’s mise en scene. Prosenjit also quickly checked out all the photographs from the recce trip Palit made recently with director Aniruddha and producer Shoojit Sircar.

“Bangla shokto noy,” Prosenjit was explaining to Padmapriya, who wants to pick up Bangla and dub herself. Prosenjit and Padmapriya play the husband-and-wife duo of Pradeep and Kuhu in the film, which is adapted from a story by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Aniruddha’s third film also stars Chandan Roy Sanyal and Kamalinee Mukherjee. The music is by Shantanu Moitra.

After the pictures were clicked, Aniruddha sat down with Prosenjit and Padmapriya to rehearse a scene from the film. “It’s an important dinner scene where Pradeep wants to share something with Kuhu, which she feels she already knows,” the director spelt out. Two steaming cups of tea sat in for the dinner dishes even as both the actors quickly got under the skin of their characters and tried to play out a scene they are going to shoot more than a month later in the US.