KOLKATA EXTREME | DOWN AND DIRTY IN KOLKATA

Cosmic Sex

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Si parla troppo poco di cinema indipendente indiano. Vi ripropongo un testo del 2012 dedicato ai cineasti più trasgressivi della scena bengali. Kolkata Extreme | Down and dirty in Kolkata, Nandini Ramnath, Mint, 12 ottobre 2012:

'There wasn’t an empty seat at the premiere of Amitabh Chakraborty’s Bengali movie Cosmic Sex at the Osian’s Cinefan film festival in Delhi in August. Delegates crammed into the 1,865-seater Auditorium 1 at the Siri Fort complex, seduced by the promise of uncensored sexual intercourse in an Indian film (they weren’t disappointed). The presence of lead actor Rii, easily one of the most uninhibited women in Indian cinema, further electrified the crowd. The diminutive beauty, who hands out lessons in desire and sexual fulfilment to a truth-seeking young man, gamely took on questions after the screening about whether she was “as erotic as her character" and what she thought of Sigmund Freud. A few questions were about the movie’s exploration of the idea of achieving spiritual equilibrium through sex. But people mostly wanted to take a closer look at the actor who is the face of an exciting and promising strain of independent film-making. 

It’s experimental, transgressive, idiosyncratic and phantasmagorical and it is emerging out of the most relaxed among the metropolises - Kolkata. The West Bengal capital has a long-established tradition of radical and independent-spirited film-makers, from Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray to Subrata Sen and Suman Mukhopadhyay. So it is only natural that the city is producing several fascinating experiments in documentaries and features. (...)

Cosmic Sex includes ideas previously explored by 53-year-old Chakraborty in his 2006 documentary Bishar Blues, about Bengal’s Muslim fakir tradition. A young man named Kripa encounters a prostitute, a eunuch and, most crucially, a female ascetic named Sadhana on his journey of sexual self-discovery. Kripa’s experiences unfold as a reverie amid a mythic landscape that is identifiably the Bengal of wandering ascetics and miracle workers. “Cults like the fakirs and the Bauls feel that sexual energy is the most powerful force that flows outwards all the time, because of which there are manifestations of happiness, unhappiness and death," Chakraborty says at his home in Kolkata. “The only way to get out of this is to reverse the sexual energy. You have to go back to the unchanging energy source." Cosmic Sex is only Chakraborty’s second movie in 23 years after his experimental debut Kaal Abhirati. (...)

Bishar Blues

Q’s musical Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards). (...) Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s operatic critique of social rigidity, which was inspired by Lewis Carroll and written in 1933, Q’s fantasy adventure, about a prince who strains at his royal leash, will be premiered at the International Rome Film Festival in November and will be released in India in 2013. Q says Tasher Desh has been in the making ever since he decided to become a film-maker. “Tasher Desh is an immensely popular production that is usually treated as a kids’ play," he says. “In the neighbourhood in which I grew up, the guy who could sing would get the central character, the prince. I was the prince for the neighbourhood, but then I got demoted when the play was performed at school. I was horribly disappointed and vowed that this would be avenged."

A trailer reveals that like in Gandu, Q is jettisoning conventional storytelling modes in favour of an audio-visual head rush through a theatrical acting style, hand-held, highly mobile camerawork and rapid-fire editing. The film has been shot in West Bengal and Sri Lanka. (...) “I didn’t care for the story - it is an experience, with its songs and its exotica," Q says. “I believe in the present moment, not in stories. Tasher Desh is structured like a fairy tale, it’s metaphysical and metaphorical." Tasher Desh has been produced by Q’s outfit Overdose, Kolkata-based recording studio Dream Digital, Belgian company Entre Chien Et Loup, the National Film Development Corporation and Anurag Kashyap Films. The movie brings Q a few steps out of the Kolkata underground and into the mainstream - sort of. “I don’t think Tasher Desh will bring us into a mainstream that means palatable and marketable," Q says. “I am trying to counter the fact that we don’t have channels of distribution for alternate content."

Gandu, made in 2010, was never meant to be released. The experiment in extreme cinema that more people have heard of than seen was a break-out for Q and a breakaway from the realism and restraint usually found in commercial film-making. The mostly black and white movie (...) follows an angst-ridden young man’s journey towards self-fulfilment through highly stylized camerawork, choppy editing and interludes of profane Bengali rap. The protagonist’s claustrophobia, stemming from his sterile surroundings and his sense of emasculation, literally explodes in a no-holds-barred colour sequence of sexual intercourse, which has earned the film eternal notoriety.

Tasher Desh

Q is an agent provocateur with a plan. He has been assiduously working towards creating an alternative system of finance and distribution with Overdose (its business cards promise “explosive Indian content"). He collaborates with a tightly knit group of like-minded souls, some of whom he has grown up with, in the production of “cheap and dirty pictures about sexual, social or political extreme content that otherwise can’t be made", on budgets of ₹ 25-30 lakh [1 lakh = 100.000], that will subsidize each other.

“Since a production house can’t operate on one production, our strategy is to go for two kinds of cinema," he says. “We can make films like Tasher Desh, which is nothing like Gandu but carries the same spirit. If that works out, we have a killer set-up - we can make cheap, extreme films that are not bound by distribution in India. (...) We can recoup the money internationally as well as keep up the fight of pushing the boundaries of viewership." The label Bangla Black has been set up expressly to launch regular attacks on the system. “These are all gambles, high-velocity risks, but they are not uncalculated," Q says. (...)

His partner in cinema and in life [is] Rii, officially Rituparna Sen. (...) When she met Q in 2003, she had spent two years modelling and acting in television. She thought his debut feature Tepantorer Mathe would give her a foothold in the movies. “I thought the film would make me a star, but I was heartbroken when I found it was not going to come out," she says. The two started seeing each other, and Rii got introduced to the film-makers who would turn out to be the leading lights of Kolkata Candid: Shyamal Karmakar, who edited Tepantorer Mathe, and Amitabh Chakraborty, who was making Bishar Blues. “I love films that are challenging and borderline and dangerous," Rii says. “I will do anything for these three film-makers - they are crazy and difficult, but I love their work. Lust is not their prime focus."

Karmakar, an editor who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, is one of Q’s major inspirations. Karmakar’s documentary I Am the Very Beautiful, made in 2006, is a genre-defying exploration of the film-maker’s desire for a bar singer named Ranu Gayen. Karmakar makes no bones about his attraction to Gayen, who is attached to his friend. He asks her to sleep with him and films her semi-naked. Gayen is no shrinking violet either, and as director and subject come dangerously close, the documentary explores the nature of voyeurism and the difficulty of maintaining a pretence of objectivity or distance. Karmakar is in thrall of female sexuality, and unlike many other film-makers, he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“My idea of sexuality was ruptured in Pune," says 48-year-old Karmakar at his office at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata, where he heads the editing department. “I fell in love with women with different moralities and attitudes to morality." Some film-makers explore dreams, some nightmares, while others confront their sexual fantasies, he says. “I want to tell the truth," Karmakar says. “I am very scared to tell my stories, but telling them is important. There are very few places to screen your films in Kolkata," he observes. “But it helps to be under the radar. The less I am seen by people, the better for me."

Q

Perhaps there is no better place than Kolkata to unleash the private into the public. “If you look at what’s happening in Bengali cinema, it’s been brewing for over a decade and a half," says Moinak Biswas, professor at Jadavpur University’s film studies department. “Things have come to a head - there is an all-time record of production in Bengali cinema. Soon, most of these films will find it difficult to get a release." A film like Gandu came as “a slap on the face" of a wave of domestic dramas that were “stifling and didn’t show anything happening beyond well-furnished middle-class homes", Biswas says. “What was unconvincing and disturbing about Gandu was a very male and adolescent expression. I think Amitabh is much more contemplative - whatever one’s disagreements with his film, he has pushed it beyond explicitness and sensationalism into a zone of contemplation."

Kolkata’s advantage is that it isn’t yet facing the pressures of being a centre of global capital, like Mumbai or Delhi. It is in that sweet place between its radical past and possibility-filled present. “This city makes space for us to be here," Q says. “The film-makers here are not contaminated." Kolkata lets an actor like Rii coexist with the poppets and retiring beauties of the mainstream film industry - even though, she says, people still don’t know how to slot her. “My life is so abnormal," she points out. “I live with my boyfriend who is named Q and directs me in films for which he asks me to suck another man’s cock. They are completely head-fucked".'

Vedi anche Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma 2012

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR: ART CINEMA AND INDIA'S FORGOTTEN FUTURES

The Hindu ieri ha pubblicato un'articolata intervista concessa da Rochona Majumdar, autrice del saggio Art Cinema and India's forgotten futures. Film and history in the postcolony. Riporto di seguito un lungo estratto. Indian art cinema gives us an ongoing resource to live through disorienting times: Rochona Majumdar, C.S. Venkiteswaran:

'A new book on Indian art cinema focuses on Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen to bring in fresh historical perspectives and understanding to the genre, its concerns and trajectories. Historian Rochona Majumdar, author of Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, talks about the many competing but no less legitimate ways of being Indian that art cinema animated. Excerpts:

Your book addresses the film scholar and the cineaste, the academic and film society activist. How did it take shape and what inspired it? (...)

Over the years, I became increasingly convinced that the history of modern India must engage more with the post-Independence period. To understand the ideas of India - and I emphasise the plural here - we need to focus on the post-1947 years and analyse Indian pasts and futures from that point. Furthermore, the imagination of the modern nation was not just expressed in books. It lay in aesthetic and popular forms to understand which historians need to retool themselves and bring their practice into conversation with other disciplines. The book stemmed from these insights. As a historian, I did not want to shy away from thinking about aesthetic objects such as films as instantiations of history-making. Instead of treating films as a “source” for writing history, I wanted to understand a mass democracy like India by thinking historically with its preeminent mass product - the cinema. To be sure, I am passionate about films. Even though I was aware of the separation between art and mainstream films growing up I was not invested in it. But the division interests me intellectually. In the context of Indian Film Studies, even as scholars acknowledge the place of art films they are immediately dismissed as elitist, the cinema of a minority, a bastion of privilege, in cahoots with the state, and so forth. Yet, even with the most celebrated filmmakers - I discuss three of them in my book - it is really difficult to get good prints of films that are properly subtitled. I asked myself what it meant to think about a body of films that were not part of the film-industrial structures and yet were indispensable in considering imaginations of the new nation state.

You consider art cinema a distinct form of knowledge. Its pedagogy and practices involved filmmakers, the film society movement, the state. There are synergies between art and state, imaginations and institutions, aesthetic visions and political projects, which at certain times are complementary and at other times (often necessarily) at odds with each other. How do you see the evolution of these dynamics post-90s, when the state retreated from culture and a Hindu majoritarian imagination began to gain supremacy? How do you think the art cinema project grapples with it, if at all?

As you know, my account of art cinema begins when there was shared ground between filmmakers, cineastes, state, and government. Both mainstream and art films sought to understand and communicate a sense of the postcolonial present that, despite bearing the scars of colonialism, was nevertheless poised towards a future of progress and development. During the 1960s, that sense of hope and a naturalised sense of transition lost its spell for many. In my book, I focus on three foundational figures - Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen - to analyse the ways in which they apprehended the postcolonial present in the wake of their disillusionment with developmental processes. As I state in the book, the position of art cinema from the 1960s on is not just about a break with a history of cinematic form and practice. It is a new mode of apprehending postcolonial history.

We live in a different historical moment now. Cinema for me is always more capacious than just the film. It is a universe of viewing practices, discussions, writing, screenings, intimacy, censorship, debates and much else. To think of cinema in our present moment requires an attunement to new media forms and the ways in which they articulate with or dissent from state and other powers. The levels of anxiety we witness globally about the control of media - films, videos, Internet - would be inexplicable unless we agreed that in this world saturated with images everyone is vying to make some images stick. (...) Whilst acknowledging the power of these moments, I do want to underscore that all too often the power of images is not decisive, especially when we are oversaturated with them. There are a huge number of people who own mobile phones and produce a plethora of images continuously. The dizzying speed and volume of images in circulation produces a sense of disorientation. That is why art cinema of the 1960s-1970s is a resource to me - because it gives us a repertoire of images, sounds, and stories to live through disorienting times. That is the one thing our present has in common with the past - they are both disorienting. Indian art cinema provides an ongoing resource to live through this sense of disorientation.

One cannot escape the book’s ‘Bengal-centrism’. Not only in putting Ray-Ghatak-Sen at the centre of the project, but also in terms of your basic thematic concerns. What about cinemas like Kannada, Malayalam or Marathi, whose art cinema movements were triggered by and nurtured in totally different socio-politico-cultural ambiences? Or do you think Indian art cinema closely follows the Bengali trio?

One of the things that struck me when I was conducting research on this book was the place that many filmmakers and practitioners gave to the Bengali trio. They seemed to suffer less from the “Bengal-fatigue” that plagues Indian academics. That said, not all three were equally respected or cited: Adoor Gopalakrishnan spoke very warmly of Ray and Sen; Shahani writes eloquently about Ghatak. (...) But you make an important point. Each region is distinct; each is cosmopolitan in its way. Sen made a film in Telugu and in Odia because he was able to secure regional funding from places other than West Bengal. This is by way of saying that it would be reductive to create a unified Bengaliness that we lump on to each of the three directors I discuss. I am sure this would be true of Kerala. G. Aravindan’s sensibilities would be very different from Adoor’s. Indeed, until the present moment when there is tremendous anxiety about producing an image of one India, the period I write about presents us with many, competing but no less legitimate ways of being Indian that were regionally grounded but open to a world. It was not the homogenous globe of globalisation, but an internationalist outlook firmly situated in regions.

You say about Indian art cinema that ‘belatedness did not confer subordinate status upon the post-colonial’. How will you extend this argument to film theorising and historicising, especially when discourses about ‘third’ or ‘radical’ cinema are almost non-existent? Also, the role played by film society movement was crucial in creating certain basic templates and approaches to film writing in India. In the post-film appreciation era, film studies became academic discipline, leading to a certain kind of language, theoretical tools and jargon, and also a radical shift in publication formats, platforms, and readership. How do you see the impact of the withdrawal of ‘film society style writing on quality, content and intent of film writing in India today? Has academization brought in anything that could be termed ‘Indian film theory’? (...)

Film societies heralded film appreciation in India and other parts of the world. Before the establishment of academic film studies, film societies and the kind of criticism they engaged in made cinema an object of serious engagement in many parts of the world. There is a legacy of film society type of film appreciation in academic film studies. For instance, studying the formal aspects of film and the moving image, learning about different international cinemas, auteur studies show continuities with film society writings. Notwithstanding all the criticisms made of auteur studies, the fact remains that third cinema studies too focus a great deal on particular films and filmmakers even as they acknowledge that a film is first and foremost a political act, an act of liberation. I agree with you that the rise of cultural studies shifted the radar sharply to an appreciation of the popular often at the expense of an engagement with aesthetic questions on the ground that the latter compromised radical politics. 

Today, we are once again at a different moment in history - of nations, institutions, disciplines, and the world. As scholars, we are painfully aware that uncritical adulation of the popular can veer sharply toward authoritarian and populist forms of politics. The space for recalcitrant artistic and intellectual practice is threatened in many parts of the world. There is a distinction to be drawn between elitism of the intellect and elitism fostered by neo-liberal capital. Under the circumstances, we can ill afford to write off critical artistic practices of the early postcolonial years even as we remain critical of the exclusions they perpetuated. Film, theatre, literature were sites of radical critique of the state, the continuing effects of colonial rule, and neo-colonial practices in the postcolonial world. They teach us the difficult task of judgement. Indian art cinema was crucial in such endeavours. As I mentioned above, its materials and forms were cosmopolitan, but not by diluting the deeply grounded experiences of the local and regional to an anxiety about universal accessibility.

You describe art cinema as ‘histories of their present that point toward possible, unrealised futures.’ You analyse the works of Ray, Sen and Ghatak from this perspective. What happened to this trajectory of ‘art cinema’? Who do you think are its successors in post-Ray Bengali cinema?

Gautam Ghose and Aparna Sen are two Bengali filmmakers whose early work especially was a continuation of trends in art filmmaking into the 1980s. I see Rituparno Ghosh as a turning point. Ghosh often saw himself as a legatee of Ray. I find his work fascinating but a complete break from the art cinema I have discussed in my book. I agree with film scholar Sangita Gopal who describes Ghosh’s work as “Bollywood local”. Art cinema belonged to the pre-globalisation era. While some of its important formal features remain in our times, namely realism, the political bite of the earlier period seems absent. That said, in recent years I have watched with much pleasure and profit films by several filmmakers - both feature and documentary. They include Chaitanya Tamhane, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Nagraj Manjule, Ivan Ayr, Arun Karthick, Paromita Vohra, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neeraj Ghaywan, and Nandita Das. I think a lot of interesting and challenging work is happening on OTT platforms'.

ALL EYES ON ANIRBAN BHATTACHARYA

Anirban Bhattacharya è uno dei miei attori preferiti. Ho ammirato il suo talento in una manciata di pellicole in lingua bengali, non tutte entusiasmanti, e l'ho adorato in Finally Bhalobasha. Ieri Film Companion ha pubblicato un lungo articolo, All eyes on Anirban Bhattacharya, firmato da Sankhayan Ghosh. Riporto di seguito un estratto:

'The 35 year old is an actor, thinker, and now a director. Is he also Bengali cinema’s new hope? (...)

Watching him steal the show, in one middling film after another, has been one of the handful few positives of contemporary Bengali cinema. And his recent debut as a film director with the rich, entertaining Macbeth adaptation, Mandaar, posits him as a creative force to reckon with, a serious artist with a political consciousness working in the mainstream. (...)

In his early film roles, you get the impression of a classically trained actor with the electricity of a young Shah Rukh Khan. Then there is his Bangla enunciation, which can turn exposition dumps into masterclasses on how to say lines. (...) Bhattacharya is an exemplar of a Bengali acting legacy - and also a British and American one - of having a career in theatre alongside films.

Add to that, his (female) fan following, which may have its origins in his role as the wayward husband in an attempted murder case in Eagoler Chokh (2016), from the detective franchise Shabor. In what is considered to be his breakout performance, Bhattacharya played the character with an irresistible mix of vulnerability and a bad boy attitude. The character is a baffling contradiction and at one point, even the dour, sarcastic Goenda Shabor, played by Saswata Chatterjee, grudgingly acknowledges his subtly carnal appeal. “He’s not that handsome, but there is something attractive about him”. 

When I got in touch with him for the interview, Bhattacharya was in Purulia shooting a two-hander opposite Kaushik Ganguli in which he plays his wife’s lover. Immediately upon his return he was going to perform consecutive shows of (...) anti-fascist play Mephisto, in which he plays the protagonist Hendrik Hofgen, a talented actor in a left-leaning theatre group in Germany, who, in Faustian fashion, sells his soul after the Nazi party comes to power. I sneaked into one of the rehearsals. 

Bhattacharya was in the middle of a scene, in character, storming across the room locked in a heated exchange of words with a co-actor. Couple of days later, on a drizzly, chilly Saturday evening, I saw him in the actual play. (...) In the climax, his character, torn between conscience and opportunism, pleads to the audience, ‘What do they want from me? I am... just an actor.’ The play had been revived earlier that year before the elections, and had a good run till the second wave hit. With the looming possibility of BJP coming to power all too real, the audience reaction was much more tense; Bhattacharya told me later that he could hear collective gasps in the auditorium while performing. This time around, even though it was a full-house, the reactions weren’t quite the same. That sense of urgency was gone. Bhattacharya wasn’t disappointed but fascinated by the experience. “This connection that theatre has with time. Duronto. (Incredible),” he said. 

Bhattacharya is a critical thinker. He is unusually perceptive and tends to go deep into a subject. This is not always interview-friendly. (...) Examining the complexity of human life, according to Bhattacharya, is precisely what the artist is supposed to do. “You can choose to say, ‘I like things uncomplicated,’ but as an art practitioner, I have learnt otherwise. Our job is to scratch the surface of everyday life and get into its insides,” he said. We were at the National Mime Institute in Salt Lake, where Bhattacharya was rehearsing for a play by Jean-Paul Sartre he was directing for his group Sangharam Hatibagan. He was on the director’s chair as the actors performed. His instructions were minimal and he smiled when they did something surprising. Later he would tell me how the rehearsal session had a power dynamic going on. As did the Mephisto rehearsals I had attended last week, in which he got the best treatment among the actors. “This is coming from a power structure. Because there is a certain perception in society about me,” he said. 

A post-truth world, climate change, digital explosion - it’s not unnatural that someone as sensitive as Bhattacharya has been in a bit of a doomsday mood. The pandemic only worsened it. And yet it is from this bleak state of mind that Mandaar emerged. Somewhere it has made its way into the story of the fictional coastal town of Geilpur, described as “a fish eats fish world”, in which nobody really loves anybody - or even if they do, don’t show. It’s in the transactional nature of the relationships, or in the Che Guevara T shirt of a character “who has no idea who Che Guevara is”. “If you ask me where it comes from, no it doesn’t come from the sand and sea that you see in Mandaar. It comes from contemporary society,” Bhattacharya said. 

Uncompromising in its artistic vision, the five episode series on Hoichoi is also cannily tuned to the popular tastes of the times. There is revenge, there is violence and sex, and there is language laced with profanity. Apart from being well received by critics, it has also been announced as the streaming platform’s biggest show of 2021. Despite that, Bhattacharya is not entirely uncritical of his own work, a rarity in an industry that doesn’t seem to introspect. “We failed to communicate that a Dalit kills Mandaar. It got diluted in the supernatural stuff. It’s almost as if an emerging neta is walking the streets and a naked kid exposes him. It didn’t become a political statement, and that’s a failure,” said the 35 year old actor-director who grew up in Medinipur. 

Bhattacharya’s closeness to SVF, the most powerful production house in West Bengal, puts him in a tricky position to comment on the state of affairs of Bengali cinema. On the one hand, unlike others industrywallahs, he doesn’t pretend that everything is alright. At the same time his deep commitment towards the fraternity forbids him to say certain things. As a result, there is a duality, a contradiction, a conflict. Bhattacharya’s high standards and his credibility as a truth-teller means his answers didn’t follow the usual incestuous back-patting that has become the industry norm. (...) He has no qualms in saying that he owes all his artistic integrity to theatre. ( “All my learning has pretty much stopped after getting into cinema. Here they ask for something, I deliver. There is only give, no take.”) 

It would be followed by something out of character and conservative with convoluted logic like “the film industry should solve its problems internally - it doesn’t need to acknowledge openly because it’s a projection-based industry”, or “SVF and Srijit Mukherji are the establishment, and sometimes people are anti-establishment for the sake of it.” But by and large, Bhattacharya agrees that something’s rotten in the state of Denmark and those problems are systemic. “It’s not going to go overnight. We need five back to back good films, and maybe the game will change,” he says. 

Bhattacharya is on his way to becoming a part of that establishment - if he already isn’t, that is. He has two projects coming up as a director already, the “quirky and pop” Bottolar Goyenda and the horror-comedy Ballavpurer Roopkotha. “Now I have to enter the factory. That’s the rule of the Bengali industry,” he said, with a resigned cynicism when I asked him, ‘So, now what?’ You need someone within the system to change it, and maybe Bhattacharya is our best man. Mandaar is a shining example that high quality entertainment can emerge from within the constraints of the Bengali film industry, which has serious infrastructural issues. What it lacked in budget and equipment, it made up with creativity, symbolic imagery and technical improvisation. (...). 

But where Mandaar had the luxury of an actor doing a one-off directorial project, his future films may not. With a focus on specifically looking for lead roles, and a Hindi debut on the cards with Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway(*), Bhattacharya is only going to get busier'. 

(*) Si tratta della nuova pellicola interpretata da Rani Mukherjee.

APARNA SEN IS ASKING TOUGH QUESTION WITH THE RAPIST AND WINNING AWARDS

Ieri The Hindu ha pubblicato una lunga intervista concessa da Aparna Sen a Prathyush Parasuraman. Vi propongo di seguito il testo integrale:

'The filmmaker’s 16th film just picked up the top honour at the Busan International Film Festival. She discusses how she meticulously researched the subject and then trusted her instincts.

‘Why does a man become a rapist?’ The question has been fermenting in filmmaker Aparna Sen’s mind for close to a decade. “The idea came to me first as a germ [she can’t remember if it was before or after Nirbhaya, the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case]. Then it gradually got fleshed out into a story with characters and setting,” she says. Now, with The Rapist, Sen has posed the question to the world.

A very matter-of-fact film - or as Variety magazine calls it, a “richly-layered discussion starter” - it takes no sides. It follows Naina, played by Konkona Sen Sharma, a criminology professor in Delhi who survives a brutal rape and assault, while putting forward various points of view and also questioning the validity of the carceral state and the death sentence.

In early October, The Rapist premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, and won the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award and numerous accolades. The actor-auteur’s 16th film, it was shot in 27 days in Delhi, in the slim window between the first and the lethal second Covid-19 wave. They finished shooting on April 6; the lockdown was announced on the 8th. “Actually, it was supposed to be a couple of days longer. We finished ahead of schedule thanks to our DOP [director of photography] Ayanaka Bose, who was extremely fast,” she says, recalling how they all stayed at The Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri. “We used to go down to breakfast along with the other guests staying at the hotel. So, it was not as though we were living in a bubble. We also shot in a real slum for four or five days. We were extremely lucky that [through the entire shoot] no one got sick.”

At 76, Sen is still raring to go, with more ideas, including a memoir, germinating. In an email interview, she looks back at her 40-year career as a director, and what prompted her to take on the subject of The Rapist.

Edited excerpts:

The title is a forceful one.

Yes, it is. We didn’t want to hide behind a more innocuous-sounding title. However, the theme is not about whether rapists should be given the death penalty, though that question is likely to come to mind when one watches the film. The theme is about what happens to three people whose lives are changed overnight after a horrific incident. Yes, it is also an exploration of what turns a person into a rapist because nobody is born as one. Is it genetics? Is it his environment? Or both? What is it about our society that turns such a large number of men into rapists? Social inequality? Ingrained patriarchy? Envy of the new, successful woman, and the desire to put her in her place? Or is it a combination of all these factors? It is an extremely complex issue that is addressed in the film, though not in an obvious or underlined way.

Whom did you consult while writing the script?

I talked to lawyers and activists, but not to rape survivors. I had a gut feeling that they would not wish to relive the experience by talking about it. Two of my feminist friends, who head organisations to help abused women, gave me important insights. Anuradha Kapoor, who runs Swayam - of which I, too, am a member - gave me a lot of material to read about rape survivors and details about the procedures immediately after a rape is reported. Shamita Dasgupta, who heads an organisation called Manavi in the US, told me about a new approach to crime called Restorative Justice where the victim and the perpetrator meet and talk about the reasons that made the latter act in the way he/she did. Restorative Justice isn’t mentioned in my film, but the knowledge was useful when I was writing certain scenes. For the most part though, I relied on my intuition and observations, which have served me well in the past.

This is the sixth film you have worked on with your daughter, Konkona - from Picnic (1989), when she was around 10, to The Rapist. How has your artistic collaboration evolved?

There is implicit trust on both sides. We have the same mindset and value systems. This makes it easier for her to understand what I am saying, right from the script stage. And, on my part, I know that Konkona has a very fine sense of balance, that she knows where to draw the line and will never go over the top. She has had tremendous screen presence from a very early age. It is difficult to delineate exactly how our relationship has evolved - I think she used to be very obedient earlier and listened to me much more than she does now! But then, she is much more mature as a person now and also far more proficient as an actor. I hardly ever have to direct her now. The only problem I had with her earlier was that she was rather uncomfortable doing intimate scenes. This time, I told her right at the beginning that she will have to get rid of those qualms. She looked at me with a wicked glint in her eye and said, ‘Okay, you just watch me!’ And I have to say, she delivered perfectly.

Tell us about the unusual casting of Arjun Rampal as Naina’s husband.

Why unusual? You know, the problem is that everyone just gapes at Arjun’s good looks and is unable to see beyond that! I had seen him in only two films before this, Rock On!! and Raajneeti, and I liked him very much in both. But for this film, I chose him because his appearance, or maybe his persona, exudes a certain nobility. This was necessary for the character. Also, I had noticed that he tends to underact. That was perfect for the role of Aftab. Despite all this, I was not entirely certain that he would be able to deliver and hold his own alongside Konkona. But I have to say I was in for a very pleasant surprise. Arjun is an extremely sensitive, finely-tuned actor underneath that gorgeous exterior. He and Konkona exuded the most wonderful chemistry together. He was quite a revelation as the understated, intellectual, highly-principled but emotionally-torn Aftab Malik.

In Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, you’d said that the characters were not supposed to be Muslim and Hindu - it was an organic development. Was it the same with The Rapist? Or was the love angle a reaction to the current climate?

No, it was not. At least, not consciously so. I had reasoned that having a couple who were Hindu and Muslim, where neither had the slightest desire to convert the other, would be the most economical way of imparting the information that they were truly liberal and secular. Aftab’s one line to the officer in charge immediately after the rape sequence, ‘Meri biwi Hindu hain. Koi problem hai aapko?’ [My wife is Hindu. Do you have a problem with that?] says it all!

Delhi looks dingy and grey in the film, almost like all the colour has been sucked out.

Yes. [DOP] Bose and I decided to go for a desaturated look. As if the colour is being drained away from the lives of the characters. It starts brightly enough when Naina and Aftab are leading a happy, normal life. But after the rape incident, as the mood of the film gets darker, we gradually remove the colour. In fact, both Bose and I would have been very happy if we could have shot the film in black and white, but other considerations prevailed.

How would you describe your artistic vision? How has it evolved from the ’80s to the digital and OTT space we are living in now?

I make neither experimental cinema nor so-called formula films. I make films about human beings - tell their stories, bring their joys and sorrows, desires and frustrations to the fore. Even in films like The Rapist or Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, which deal with issues of national importance, it is the individuals who matter and who the audience identifies with. Digitisation, or the OTT space, has never really bothered me too much. It is true that initially I resisted the transition from celluloid to digi-tapes. They seemed to have a more brittle quality and lacked the softness of colour and detail that we could get in celluloid. But science does not sit still. The quality of the digital medium has been improving so fast and giving such brilliant results, that one does not miss celluloid any more except for nostalgic reasons. As far as the OTT platform is concerned, it is something we have had to accept with a shrug, particularly after the onset of the pandemic. But there are merits too. We get to see the best of international cinema on OTT platforms. I saw films like Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Capernaum sitting right in front of my TV. Of course, nothing compares to the experience of sitting in a darkened auditorium and watching a film with a room full of people with no doorbell, no telephones, no sudden guests to disturb you! As far as my films are concerned, most of them have been intimate stories about individuals, not elaborate spectacles. So the OTT platforms are not unsuited for viewing them.

A career spanning over 40 years, and yet you’ve noted that when you look back at your old films you only see mistakes. Is there one you’ve wished more people would have seen and talked about?

It is true that glaring mistakes are all I see when I review my films. But this is mostly with the recent ones. When I watch an old film like 36 Chowringhee Lane or Paromitar Ek Din, I often find myself thinking, ‘Well, that’s not too bad after all!’ I wish more people could have seen Yugant, which was somehow neglected outside Bengal. I wish I could have made it now with all the computer graphics available to us today, because there is an apocalyptic scene at the end with the sea breaking into flames. Yugant should really have been my swan song. The other film that I feel didn’t get its due is The Japanese Wife. It should be on one of the OTT platforms at least, so that more people can watch it. But it was marketed very badly at the time and few people outside of Bengal got to see it.'

MOSTRA DEL CINEMA DI VENEZIA 2021

La 78esima Mostra del Cinema di Venezia si svolgerà dal primo all'11 settembre 2021. Once upon a time in Calcutta, pellicola in lingua bengali diretta da Aditya Vikram Sengupta, è in concorso nella sezione Orizzonti. Gli attori Sreelekha Mitra e Arindam Ghosh sono attesi al festival. Trailer. Vi ricordo che il film muto Asha Jaoar Majhe, opera prima di Sengupta, era stato presentato a Venezia, nel 2014, nell'ambito della rassegna autonoma Giornate degli Autori, e si era aggiudicato il premio per il miglior regista esordiente (stesso premio conquistato anche ai National Award). Once upon a time in Calcutta è in cartellone a Milano, in occasione dell'evento Le vie del cinema 2021, dal 22 al 30 settembre.

Vi segnalo inoltre il cortometraggio pachistano Mulaqat, diretto da Seemab Gul, in concorso nella sezione Orizzonti.

Sreelekha Mitra e Arindam Ghosh - Venezia, 2021

RASSEGNA STAMPA (aggiornata al 28 settembre 2021)

- A city of walking ghosts and new beginnings, Nandini Ramnath, Scroll, 7 settembre 2021. Intervista concessa da Sengupta:

'The earliest image in Once Upon a Time in Calcutta is of fire. Out of the ashes emerge, appropriately enough, an elegy about one of India’s most storied cities. (...) Kolkata is both a graveyard of desires and the birthplace of new and sometimes unmanageable desires. The Bengali-language film follows Ela, a small-time actor, and the people in her lives. (...) After the death of her only daughter, Ela resolves to leave her husband Shishir and move out of their residence in an old building in South Kolkata. Ela’s journey is guided by the reappearance of an old flame and a tempting offer from the head of a building project in a satellite city on the outskirts of the megapolis. The movie also explores Ela’s relationship with her mother, a famed cabaret dancer, and her step-brother Bubu, who owns a theatre for stage productions in the heart of the city and is refusing to sell it to a real estate developer. Among the themes is the tension between the comfort of habit and the seductions of untested experiences, the rising influence of speculative capital and questionable get-rich-quick schemes, and the transactional nature of modern relationships. Stasis and rupture co-exists in the city of Sengupta’s imagination. Rabindranath Tagore is a talismanic presence in a movie filled with restless souls and the ghosts of an oppressive past. “All papers are fake these days,” a character observes - a truth that Ela is eventually forced to embrace. (...) Once Upon a Time in Calcutta contains striking tableaux, mood lighting and expressionist locations imbued with meaning and stories of their own. (...)

The city in your film appears to be growing outwards but hollowing out too.

The core of the city isn’t made of physical spaces but of people. That’s what I wanted to explore - the city and its various layers through the people. This is something I have been feeling for the past few years - the core of the city is kind of emptying out slowly. A lot of it has to do with globalisation and a booming information technology industry. There doesn’t appear to be a sense of great discovery, and getting to know people nowadays requires great emotional investment. For me, the film was about getting into the minds of the people. They inhabit worlds of their own with their own baggage and aspirations.

‘Once Upon a Time in Calcutta’ was previously titled ‘Memories and My Mother’, right?

Yes, that was previously the working title. The story and script were in a more magic realist space and had to do more with the fact that all the characters were motherless, and their mothers appeared to them as spirit. It started evolving and became more realistic. Of course, the city changed too, as did I. An earlier title was Aquarium, about looking at these different kinds of fish but from the outside. I liked the title a lot, but no one else did.

How has your relationship with the city of your birth changed, specially since you divide your time between Kolkata and Mumbai?

I lived full-time in Bombay between 2008 and 2011 and then again for a few years. I continue to work out of Bombay, it’s like my workshop. I feel most at home in Bombay, the people are warm and there is a sense camaraderie but the space gets to me. I moved back to Calcutta because I get more space to work here. I have my music and painting studio here. There are many things to crib about, such as the attitudes of people, the slowness of getting things done, the fact of being stuck in certain ideas. But there are also certain strange comforts - the familiarity of the afternoons the evenings, the sounds of bells, the smells of bedsheets that have come out of old wooden cupboards. It’s a complex love-hate relationship.

Tell us about the faces and places in your film.

Everything you see in the film is based on real people or experiences. For instance, the dinosaur that is demolished to make way for a flyover in the film - there was one such dinosaur that was built whe made in 1995 when the Science City [tourist attraction] came up. A flyover was built here later. When the half-made flyover approaching from one end and reached the dinosaur, it looked like the starting point of a race. I had clicked a photo at the time. It had a deeper meaning for me, and in fact, is the starting point for this film. Characters like the dinosaur cannot exit in this new eco-system. I always like looking for real locations and existing places. (...) There is no pre-decided colour palette. This is a contemporary film about the beauty as well as vast and stark differences in all these places - the clashing colours and un-coordination, in a sense. Bubu’s theatre is the Sarkarina theatre in Hatibagan. (...) When the theatre started declining, cabaret was introduced here. It’s where people like Miss Shefali performed. She appeared in a few Satyajit Ray films. (...) Ela is supposed to be her daughter in my film.

Why did you pick Gökhan Tiryaki as the cinematographer?

I have always wanted to work with him. His films with Nuri Bilge Ceylan are very character-driven, and I am a very visual person. The film is a mixture of both. I thought it would be interesting for him to have his mind on the film. Besides, I love collaborating with and working with people. We shot the film between January and March in 2019. I like to work with a light crew, I like it to be peaceful and meditative. When we would go the sets, Gökhan and I would first sit around and talk about the scenes. We would get the actors on the sets and then make them do their scenes over and over again. We would just watch them, and not film them. Gökhan would move round them like a planet to get the right point of view. Once we fixed the angle, we would only then take the shot.

Why made you cast film and television Sreelekha Mitra in the lead role?

The casting process went on for two years. But when writing Ela’s character, Sreelekha was the only one who I felt could play this role. Her own life and struggles have been similar to Ela’s. When we were shooting the film, she was trying to move to a new apartment at the end of the city. She has always felt that the Bengali film industry never gave her the love and respect she deserved. She has an interesting physicality, and brings greyness to the way she behaves with the other characters.

- Recensione di Once upon a time in Calcutta, Sankhayan Ghosh, Film Companion, 7 settembre 2021: 'There are many remarkable things in Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Once Upon A Time in Calcutta, which begins with the death of the protagonist’s four year old daughter. One of them is how, instead of crushing her, the event sets the middle-aged and independent minded Ela (Sreelekha Mitra, in one of those roles that makes you wonder which came first: the character, or the actor?) on the path of liberation. (...) In another film, this would have been a personal journey narrative, disconnected from the larger forces at play. Sengupta’s film locates her in a specific time and place, connected to the events and spaces that have shaped Kolkata in the past few years. (...) The film has been rightly described as a chronicling of a post-communist era city. This is a new Kolkata - one that our cinema has failed to reflect. Once Upon A Time in Calcutta tries to articulate the complicated feelings for this new city of blue and white. The title makes sense for multiple reasons, and one of them is the refusal to let go of the past. (...) Once Upon a Time in Calcutta is both Sengupta’s most ambitious and conventional film. It shows the director in a somewhat new light. (...) Here Sengupta (...) has a better go at handling actors the way we are used to seeing in narrative cinema. And he seems to posses a natural talent for it, imbuing even the smallest characters with something unique to hold our attention. (...) This is a film rich in images, scenes and shots'.

- Recensione di Once upon a time in Calcutta, Gautaman Bhaskaran, CNN News18, 8 settembre 2021: 'Sengupta, who is also the writer, tries to present a city after it’s emergence post the 32-year Communist rule in West Bengal (whose capital is Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata). The piece is nostalgic both in its tone and tenor, and the richness of the colours gives an almost ethereal glow to the city. (...) The images are fascinating and certainly brought back memories of the city where I grew up, and whose decline I watched with a lot of sadness. (...) Once Upon A Time in Calcutta has a compelling plotline, but wanders away from it by taking on too many issues. A chit-fund scam, flyover collapses, corruption, jilted love and what not crowd the narrative making the pacing jerky. And unimaginative editing robs the feature of a certain crispness which could have been otherwise achieved. It also is far too long. Half way through, we lose sight of the core premise, and Sengupta’s effort is laudable, even ambitious, but somewhere he lets the reins slip'.

- Recensione di Once upon a time in Calcutta, Elisabetta Colla, Taxidrivers, 16 settembre 2021: 'Atmosfera grigia e cupa, (...) per raccontare una Calcutta insolita. (...) In alcuni momenti  difficile da seguire e poco ispirato. Pure la modalità in cui le storie vengono ad intrecciarsi e l’affresco di una Calcutta ‘altra’ interessano e colpiscono. (...) Una narrativa densa e noir, il c’era una volta di una favola drammatica, con qualche raro raggio di sole che sembra intravedersi di quando in quando nei difficili rapporti umani raccontati dal film. Il regista descrive individui con gravi problematiche esistenziali, solitudini relazionali e nostalgie di tempi migliori, quelli dell’infanzia, quando era ancora forte la dimensione comunitaria, e la difficile ricerca di un posto nel mondo, dopo aver sperimentato il dolore e la morte. (...) Ispirato a fatti realmente accaduti, il film (...) potrebbe alludere a una critica di Sengupta all’urbanizzazione selvaggia, priva di regolamentazione, che ha accelerato i processi di disintegrazione socio-familiare e favorito ulteriormente miseria e solitudine. “Il film è il culmine dei sentimenti e delle emozioni che provo per Calcutta e i suoi abitanti - afferma il regista - una città impegnata nel tentativo di stare al passo con un mondo in rapida evoluzione e le aspirazioni e gli sforzi di persone che annaspano in una metropoli in continua espansione. Utilizzando personaggi reali ed eventi effettivamente accaduti, il film è il mio tentativo di eliminare i vari strati della città un tempo comunitaria, per rivelare una condizione umana tragica ma, allo stesso tempo, piena di speranza e di gioia. Ho cercato di dare agli spettatori un vero spaccato delle acque torbide di Calcutta, attraverso dei personaggi vivaci che cercano in ogni modo di ritagliarsi un loro spazio, senza affogare”.'

- Recensione di Once upon a time in Calcutta, Raffaele Meale, Quinlan, 28 settembre 2021: 'Sono molte le suggestioni che derivano dalla visione di Once Upon a Time in Calcutta. (...) Innanzitutto emerge una riflessione che il film condivide con altre opere provenienti dall’Asia e viste al Lido: (...) in un mondo oramai completamente e compiutamente globalizzato, (...) anche nazioni che fino a qualche anno - decennio? - fa erano considerate “in via di sviluppo” quando non direttamente “terzo mondo” presentano fenomeni sociali ben noti e storicizzati in Occidente, ad esempio la cosiddetta gentrificazione. (...) Sengupta (...) ha le idee molto chiare, e partendo dallo spunto narrativo suggerito dianzi vorrebbe aprire uno squarcio nel velo posto di fronte all’India contemporanea, mostrando il rampantismo di un microcosmo sempre più avvelenato dal demone del potere economico, e dunque spinto ad azioni perfino inimmaginabili. Il suo è dunque un discorso parzialmente metaforico ma soprattutto morale, la visione di un mondo disgregato che ha perso le sue radici e fluttua in un contesto socio-economico dominato dalla barbarie, dall’homo homini lupus. La Calcutta mostrata nel film è una città/mostro, cloaca nella quale si annaspa e si può al massimo sperare di sopravvivere: perfino il raggiungimento di una apparente sistemazione, magari in un modernissimo grattacielo fuori dalla cintura del centro, è illusorio, e del tutto transitorio. Per mappare questo mondo in apparente progresso ed evidente autodistruzione Sengupta si lancia in un grande racconto corale, mettendo insieme trame e sotto-trame nel tentativo di permettere allo spettatore la posizione privilegiata (in uno dei grattacieli di nuova costruzione?) per una visione d’insieme. Il risultato non è privo di fascino, ma alla lunga risulta farraginoso anche perché il regista non riesce ad evitare quelle che appaiono in tutto e per tutto come scelte di comodo, o per meglio dire retoriche: ecco dunque l’amore del passato che torna a palesarsi celando però la verità sulla propria condizione familiare; ecco il criminale che si propone a Ela come risolutore della soluzione portando con sé suggerimenti a dir poco inappropriati; ecco il campo controcampo tra il reale - il teatro abbandonato da decenni al suo destino - e l’onirico - la memoria della donna che con le sue esibizioni aveva reso celebre il locale; ecco, infine, una politica corrotta che ama vendersi come innovativa, visionaria, moderna. Tutti schemi usurati, un po’ come lo schema Ponzi alla base della truffa immobiliare in cui viene messa in mezzo Ela, e che alla lunga appesantiscono un racconto cui avrebbe giovato una maggiore leggerezza espositiva, e forse anche un’ambizione meno evidente. Per questi motivi Once Upon a Time in Calcutta non riesce ad appassionare, se non per alcune singole intuizioni (il crollo non solo metaforico della politica cittadina nel finale, per esempio)'.

INSPECTOR NOTTY K: LE RIPRESE IN ITALIA

Jeet è tornato nel nostro Paese con una nuova produzione bengali: Inspector Notty K. Il film è diretto da Ashok Pati e interpretato da Jeet e Nusraat Faria, stella del Bangladesh in prestito a Tollywood. La troupe, dopo una tappa a fine agosto a Montepulciano, Pienza, Volterra e Siena, il 2 settembre è approdata a Genova (Corso Firenze, Castello D’Albertis, chiesa di San Matteo, Porto Antico, Castelletto, via San Lorenzo), e si è fermata in Liguria sino al 14 settembre. Non sono state girate solo sequenze musicali ma anche veri e propri stralci della trama. La protagonista è infatti una donna carabiniere che vive in Italia. Non è chiaro se sia stato allestito un set anche a Roma. Vi propongo di seguito una carrellata di immagini scattate principalmente a Genova, accompagnate da alcuni video.

Video Genova24

Video La Repubblica: riprese a Genova e dichiarazioni di Jeet

Video Il Secolo XIX: dichiarazioni di Jeet e di Nusraat Faria

Aggiornamento del 19 gennaio 2018: trailer e video dei brani Chai Na Kichui, Moner Kinare e Bhul Ja Korechi Ami.

(Volterra)

Nusraat Faria e Ashok Pati

AMI JE KE TOMAR: LE RIPRESE IN LOMBARDIA

La scorsa settimana sono state girate in Lombardia alcune sequenze di Ami Je Ke Tomar, film in lingua bengali diretto da Ravi Kinagi e interpretato da Ankush Hazra, Sayantika Banerjee e Nusrat Jahan. I set sono stati allestiti il 18 aprile a Lecco, il 19 aprile a Varenna ed Esino, il 20 aprile a Como sul lungolago e in centro città. 

Aggiornamento del 25 gennaio 2022: video dei brani Bhalobeshe Felechi e Eshe Gechi Kachakachi (girato a Milano).

Ankush Hazra e Nusrat Jahan - Milano, 2017

RANGBAAZ: LE RIPRESE IN ITALIA

Koel Mallick e Dev - Roma, 2013

(This article is dedicated to all the young fans of Koel Mallick and Dev contacting us via Twitter last days. Thanks for your infectious enthusiasm and for your cuteness. Thanks for sharing details about the film and the actors. And thanks for turning the event into a ride of total fun).

Dal 23 al 28 agosto 2013 sono state effettuate in Italia alcune riprese di Rangbaaz, film in lingua bengali diretto da Raja Chanda e interpretato da Koel Mallick e Dev. Vi propongo un breve diario dell'evento, corredato da video e fotografie. In chiusura la cronaca della mia chiacchierata a Milano con Koel e Dev.

Venerdì 23 agosto la troupe è sbarcata a Roma, dove è stato allestito qualche set. Sabato 24 agosto le riprese sono state effettuate a Como (piazza Giuseppe Verdi, piazza del Duomo, lungolago). Per il pernottamento, è stato prenotato un hotel a Cinisello Balsamo, in provincia di Milano.

Video La Provincia: riprese a Como

Video QuiComo: intervista concessa da Koel Mallick

Video CiaoComo: riprese

Video CiaoComo: intervista concessa da Koel Mallick

Domenica 25 agosto la troupe si è spostata a Milano. Il set è stato allestito nella scenografica piazza Città di Lombardia. Lunedì 26 agosto le riprese sono state effettuate nel complesso fieristico di Rho-Pero.

Video Rai 3: TGR Lombardia, 25 agosto 2013 (grazie ad Atif)

Martedì 27 agosto è stata la volta di Bellagio. Mercoledì 28 agosto la troupe, prima di ripartire, ha effettuato delle nuove riprese a Como.

Video: riprese a Bellagio 

Video: riprese a Bellagio

Koel Mallick e Dev - Como, 2013

Koel Mallick e Dev - Milano, 2013

Fiera Rho-Pero, 2013

Bellagio, 2013

  

Qualche giorno prima dell'arrivo in Italia della troupe di Rangbaaz, posto in Twitter la notizia delle imminenti riprese, e mi ritrovo sommersa da un oceano di richieste accorate da parte dei numerosi fan di Koel Mallick e di Dev. Mi implorano di recarmi sul set a Milano per consegnare i loro messaggi ai due attori, coppia cinematografica amatissima che - scopro - si è guadagnata un hashtag, #DEKO. Ora, il 25 agosto è una domenica, ed io vorrei dormire. Ma l'insistenza dei fan mi intenerisce, un po' mi incuriosisce, alla fine mi arrendo.

Al mio arrivo in piazza Città di Lombardia le riprese sono già in corso, e la solita piccola folla di curiosi circonda il set. Provo a darmi un contegno. Intercetto il buon Ivano Fucci che, caritatevolmente, mi indica i due protagonisti e mi esorta ad avvicinarli. Penso: ma sei pazzo? Non so niente di cinema popolare bengali, ho visto solo una manciata di pellicole d'autore, non so chi siano Koel e Dev, e la consapevolezza della mia ignoranza non aiuta il mio non esaltante inglese. 

Però Koel è in pausa, sembra innocua e serafica. Raccolgo il mio coraggio. Mi presento, cerco di imbastire uno straccio di conversazione senza sapere cosa dire, peggio, non avendo nulla da dire. Il mio imbarazzo è visibile. Koel, una ragazza incantevole, invece di ordinare alla sicurezza di cacciarmi via, capisce al volo la situazione e mi sorride amichevolmente. Le ricordo che in passato aveva già girato con Dev due film in Italia (Paglu e Paglu 2), e lei dichiara di essere felice di essere tornata. Accenno all'unica pellicola (d'autore) bengali che mi viene in mente in quel momento (Satyanweshi, di Rituparno Ghosh), e lei mi soccorre con la pronuncia del titolo, mostrando sorpresa per il crescente interesse in Italia per il cinema indiano. Mi colpiscono la cortesia e l'estrema educazione. Una persona davvero amabile, non solo con me, ma anche con tutti coloro con cui interagisce sul set, compresi i giornalisti italiani accorsi ad intervistarla e/o a fotografarla. Una di loro mi conferma quanto entrambi gli attori siano stati gentili e disponibili.

Quanto a Dev, è un ragazzo altissimo, privo di trucco schiarente (BRAVO!), molto sicuro di sé davanti alla telecamera. Ignara del suo successo e della sua fama in patria (altrimenti sarei fuggita via a gambe levate), mi avvicino con una certa incoscienza. Accanto a lui mi sento piccina (di statura) e un po' mi intimidisce. Mi presento, ma non ho argomenti né domande. Allora gli racconto di come il profilo Twitter del blog sia stato preso d'assalto dai suoi fan, gli riporto qualche messaggio. Lui reagisce con sincera meraviglia, sorride tutto il tempo, promette di postare nei giorni successivi più tweet e più fotografie del suo soggiorno in Italia, dichiara estrema gratitudine per l'amore dei suoi sostenitori. Io sono imbarazzata per la mia inadeguatezza, ma lui è rilassato, ruba le patatine di Koel mentre l'attrice sta girando, chiede ad un assistente di scattarci una foto (il suo braccio mi cinge le spalle, io, impietrita, quasi svengo) che poi posterà nel suo profilo Twitter. Un po' intontita dall'esperienza, mi congedo e lo lascio lavorare.

A casa mi aspetta Twitter per i ringraziamenti a Koel e a Dev, e per il resoconto della chiacchierata. Immagino le testoline dei fan in famelica attesa spuntare dagli orli della videata. Una nuova ondata di messaggi entusiastici, un paio persino da Dev: '@CinemaHindi pleasure is completely ours. Thanks for coming. Good day', e '@CinemaHindi thanks dear. This time it was amazing experience over here. Enjoyed throughly. Thanks. You also take care. Will catch again'. 

Como, 2013

Milano, 2013

Aggiornamento del 18 settembre 2013 - Dev, Koel and their Rangbaazi, The Telegraph: 'Dev and Koel got off on the right foot on the streets of Rome, shooting three song sequences. “Rane [Nispal Singh, il marito di Koel] and I had gone on a Europe trip for our honeymoon in February... I love Europe. Shooting outside the Vatican City and the Colosseum in Rome was quite a task because getting permission is very difficult, but I am glad Rane managed it and we had a blast! After every shot, we would sit at the roadside cafes and have espresso shots,” recounted Koel'.

Aggiornamento del 16 gennaio 2022: video dei brani Ki Kore Toke Bolbo, Tui Amar Hero, Love you Soniyo e Korishna Rangbaazi.

Vedi anche: 

- Paglu: le riprese in Italia

- Ajab Gazabb Love: le riprese in Italia

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Grazie a Koel Mallick e Dev per la gentilezza mostrata in occasione del nostro incontro a Milano. 

Grazie a Dev per i cortesi messaggi via Twitter. 

Grazie a Ivano Fucci per... tutto! 

GRAZIE ai numerosissimi fan di Koel e di Dev. 

Como, 2013

 

Koel Mallick, Dev e Raja Chanda - Roma, 2013

 

Como, 2013