Noukadubi — starring (from top) Sen sisters Raima and Riya, Jisshu Sengupta and Prosenjit — releases on May 20

Returning to Tagore after Chokher Bali, why did you choose Noukadubi of all his works?

I wanted to make a well-rounded Bengali film, with a story which has a populist appeal and with absolutely no complexities. Noukadubi is based on coincidences. It is a story of two sisters where every character is good and there is no psychological complexity. Only the plot is complex. Taking that essence, I invested Noukadubi with a more contemporary sensibility. My only fear is that people who watch Rituparno Ghosh films will expect a similar, complex film in Noukadubi. But there is no room for cerebration here, it is only about instant reaction.

Actually when I started working on Abohoman, I realised that most of the films being made had no stories to talk about. For most of the directors, the chief inspiration is Tarantino or Kim Ki-duk. The beauty of films by Tarun Majumdar, Tapan Sinha, Asit Sen or Ajoy Kar is lost. There’s this ‘youth’ buzz everywhere but I can’t recall having seen a better Indian youth film than Balika Bodhu, though there have been Dil Chahta Hai and Rang De Basanti. The fact that Shakti Samanta had remade Balika Bodhu in Hindi means it held a certain appeal for people. Maybe it seems too naive and simple for today’s filmmakers, so they want to deal with complexities. In hindsight, I realise that I couldn’t free myself of the complexities either. One example is Khela, which had a simple storyline.

I love complexities, but I also want to start telling simple stories. I think Noukadubi marks my journey towards a simple narrative. To make a simple narrative out of a complex plot was my challenge here. And I whipped myself all along, saying that I wouldn’t layer it with psychological nuances. Had it been my early days of filmmaking, I would never have chosen Noukadubi (laughs). It is a commercial film in that sense. How people take it is a test for me.

What makes you think a film like Noukadubi will click with today’s audience?

For the same reason why (Pradeep Sarkar’s) Parineeta did so well. It had a story for people to talk about.... There’s something quaint, naive and pure about Noukadubi which seems almost unreal in today’s times. There is a stiffness in the husband-wife relationship here, which is the premise of the story... the wife doesn’t know who her husband is.... If you do away with it, it falls flat.

We might not believe in this kind of naivety or simplicity any more but you can sympathise with the characters. You don’t need to identify with them, and there’s an escapism in the narrative that helps you relate to and also relish what is happening. There’s a sense of empathy and enjoyment at the same time. Had it been very poignant, it would have lost that appeal.

In many ways, Noukadubi feels like a Sarat Chandra novel and I have made it the way one would make a Sarat Chandra film. Chokher Bali doesn’t feel like a Sarat Chandra novel. Rabindranath had written Noukadubi after Chokher Bali, where he questions the whole institution of marriage. But Noukadubi has various elements that he developed in later works, like in Raja and Shapmochan.

Rabindranath had set Noukadubi in 1903 but I have set it in the 1920s against the backdrop of the Bhawal Sanyasi case, where you have the queen questioning the identity of her husband.

Didn’t you ever want to adapt a classic text in a more contemporary setting, like in Omkara?

I had thought of doing that with (Tagore’s) Kabuliwala. Samaresh Majumdar and I were working on the script. It would have been set after the Afghan war, where a kabuliwala works as a driver in the city…. Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish would be more on those lines. It is a deconstruction of Rabindranath’s Chitrangada, which again is a deconstruction of the Mahabharata story.

Getting sisters Raima and Riya has been a casting coup of sorts...

Raima and Riya told me that no one but a mad man would cast them together! And it was indeed a madhouse on the sets. When I told Jisshu that Riya would be working in the film, he jumped and said he didn’t want to do it (laughs). Riya is capable of doing things with such a straight face that you wouldn’t even guess she is up to something.

What is interesting about having the sisters together — whom we find very similar — is that they come across as very different from each other in the film. And yet, in a way, they seem similar. Because Ramesh (Jisshu) falls in love with Hemnalini (Raima) and then with Kamala (Riya) and then he wonders if there are shades of Hemnalini in Kamala.... It was a delight to work with Riya. Raima is my bad habit.

Your bad habit!

(Laughs.) Yes, she is!

How was Jisshu?

Very good. In certain places, he reminded me of the young Soumitra (Chatterjee) from Malyadaan. Or oi snigdhota-ta chhilo (He had that serenity).

Noukadubi is also your most outdoor-intensive film…

Yes. Khela too was shot outdoors but the variation of locations is the maximum in Noukadubi. We shot mostly in Bolpur and then in Varanasi, where Chokher Bali too was shot.

Have you shown the shipwreck?

No and that was deliberate. The film is not about noukadubi (shipwreck) but what happens as a result of that. See, if I had to stage the shipwreck realistically it would have to be on the scale of Titanic. You need an immense budget for that and doing it half-heartedly doesn’t make sense. Besides, the focus would have shifted to the spectacle.

How did the Hindi version with Subhash Ghai come about?

I wouldn’t say it has my support.... The acquaintance with Subhash Ghai began with Raincoat. We did the dubbing in his (Mumbai) studio, and he would often drop by to chat. So that’s how talks of making a film started. He wanted to produce Antarmahal but in Hindi, so I didn’t do it. Then he decided to produce Noukadubi in Bengali. He was busy with Yuvvraaj when we were shooting and so his assistants came over to oversee. It’s at the mixing level that he saw the film at Jojo-Potla’s studio (Dream Digital) and liked it immensely. He said he wanted to dub it in Hindi. I said that if the Hindi version happens then it would be his film, not mine. Gulzar said that cinema has no language, why should it have a Hindi version? The only valuable thing for me from the Hindi version is Gulzar’s translation of Rabindrasangeet.... Anyway, I really don’t know what has been re-edited in the film and who has done the dubbing for whom.

But at the end of the day, it’s you who have directed the film...

Well, Noukadubi dubbed in Hindi is not the same as Mani Ratnam dubbing Roja in Hindi. That was also made by his Madras Talkies. This Noukadubi (Kashmakash) is not my product. If I knew Noukadubi would have a Hindi version, I would never have made the film.

Why?

Because there are some Bengali nuances that are not easy for a Hindi-speaking audience to appreciate just like that. Noukadubi is very culture-specific like my other films and you can’t throw it into a different context all of a sudden. But yes, it is universal at the same time.