(Top) Taking a breather are Sanghamitra Chaudhuri, Jisshu, Koyel Banerjee and Rajatava Dutta;(below)Jisshu lends an ear to the script. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANIL GROVER

With a documentary on Tsunami behind her, and one more female director rising on the Tollywood big screen, it would be auto-conclusion to think that Sanghamitra Chaudhuri’s Chakra would be staking its claim in the arthouse cinema of female directors (they don’t usually do lowbrow stuff, hear that!). “But I want to address pure commercial Bengali cinema,” she says as gravely as an arthouse female director would. “With Chakra, I am competing not with the Aparna Sens, but with the Haranath Chakrabortys and Swapan Sahas.” And that actually, sighs Sanghamitra, is the crunch. “Believe me, it’s a tough task being a female filmmaker in a male-dominated bastion. But it’s Herculean being a female and trying to make a Bangla masala film.” The use of ‘Her-culean’ was unwittingly ironic. And she gave a metaphorical round of applause to her producers, M.L. Chowrasia, and the braveheart financier in Siliguri, Uttam Saha, for backing her with studied confidence, even when the budget shot up from Rs 30 lakh to over Rs 70 lakh.

Chakra, with Jisshu Sengupta being the spearhead of the film, along with Rajatava Dutta, and a wellknown Assamese comedian, Siddhartha Mukherjee, has an almost all-new cast including leading girl Koyel Banerjee, promising new girl Mrinmoyee and former journalist Rupa Bhattacharya playing an ‘electronic journo’ in the film, too.

Accompanied to Siliguri by Saikat Dev, formerly with the pioneering but now disbanded Bangla band Shiva, we learnt that Chakra also breaks him into Bengali film music. “Chakra has been mostly finished in Hyderabad, and just a song or two and some scenes here in Siliguri, and we wrap up the shooting,” said Sanghamitra, as we strolled down from the hotel to a building construction site (incidentally owned by the financier-promoter ? this is called synergy, we tease her) where a Vishwakarma song was about to be picturised by Murli Sir from the South. The camera (handled by Mumbai’s Debpriya Dutta, who spent all his time in Siliguri thinking up camera angles and eating momos) would also pan across a banner fleetingly which carried the line about who the promoter of the construction was (that is called infilm advertising) , and the song also used a lot of terms like eenth, cement and other construction material and related them to life. “And you know what!” the usually excitable music director Saikat conspiratorially exclaimed. “Sanghamitra herself has written all the lyrics, apart from the story, script and dialogues. And this particular lyric she dashed out to my set tune in just two hours!” We had a music listening later, too, and quite clearly Chakra has at least two numbers which will rock the film. Chakra also introduces a fresh male voice in Gautam Aditya, a very impressive voice. Built like a rockstar, he was also roped in for the Vishwakarma dance, and one wondered what his real vocation should have been. A ‘total-fida’ guy on Hrithik Roshan, he reminded us how he had picked up a quarrel with us in a film party years back when we had criticised his god in the review of Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon, and then made to touch our feet when he learnt that the subsequent Koi...Mil Gaya review had replaced his god on the pedestal!

Chakra also has a very Kisna-looking long-haired, designer-stubbled Jisshu who deserves bigger success than has come his way so far; will Chakra do it for him? The sincerity and dedication, not to speak of the amiable sense of humour, he displayed on the two days of shooting should get him just rewards. It’s only a matter of time, we guess, when the Chakra comes full circle.