05 November, 2004 - "Raincoat" postponed again! (aishwarya-forever.com)

Rituparno Ghosh's maiden Hindi venture, "Raincoat", starring Ajay Devgan and Aishwarya Rai has been postponed for a second time.

The film which was postponed first to November 26th, has now been pushed to a December 3rd/10th release.

04 November, 2004 - Music review: Raincoat (sify.com)

Rituparno Ghosh's Hindi film staring Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgan is being seen as the biggest thing to hit the Hindi screen in terms of talent. Ghosh's much-touted talent will be seen with much interest if he succeeds in making the ex-Ms World act rather than just ham through her role.

This is a love story. Manoj, played by Ajay Devgan and Niru played by Aishwarya Rai are both citizens of Bihar. The love story goes through difficult circumstances- separation and hopelessness. The name sources from the fact that the story is being narrated in the backdrop of a rainy afternoon and a rain coat becomes instrumental in expressing the love the two share.

The music of the film is outstandingly wonderful. Every number consistently of a quality that is as rare as it is uplifting. Gulzar's lyrics lose their rough edges under the baton of Debojyoti Mishra. Rituparno Ghosh is also the lyricist in this one.

Shubha Mudgal's voice takes on a softer hue here. The album starts with Mathura Nagarpati. It has the effect of a meditative session on the mind. Utterly beautiful, even the chorus fails to disrupt the mood.

Piya tora kaisa abhimaan is lovely. Hariharan does this one devoid of his normal touch - a straight rendering here but works beautifully. The song is visual- so powerful is the impact of this one.

In Hai kitne baras beete, Shubha goes folk. Another outstanding number, of longing and wistfulness, Shubha's no-nonsense rendering works for it making it even more simple than the simple lyrics.

Side B of the album starts with Shubha again. In Akele hum nadiya kinare a number of emotions- hope, loneliness, longing are there. It is a song that rejuvenates even as it complains.

Piya tora kaisa abhimaan is repeated with Shubha this time round-and she gives it her own touch which is complemented by Gulzar reciting poetry. It is difficult to give an epithet to music of this kind. It is so rare that the true meaning of music as an inexplicable experience emotional and sensuous comes through and no words are required to describe it.

Jug Jiye is sung by Meena Mishra and group-a folk number bihari style .The next song, Hamari galiyan hoke aana too is by the same singer. Both are appealing without having the eternal quality of the other numbers.

Shubha Mudgal surpasses even herself and adds to her versatility by the ease with which she walks through these numbers. A must buy and keep album.

03 November, 2004 - Raincoat is wistfully pure (rediff.com)

The setting is wet. Dark, teary-eyed clouds have set in. A room full of nostalgia sends out a melancholic fragrance.

The music of Rituparno Ghosh's Raincoat is a collection of present moods and past memories. Sometimes the mood is pensive and the memory is painful. But, at all times, the tone is wistful.

Raincoat is about a man (Ajay Devgan), woman (Aishwarya Rai) and unrequited love. Their incomplete romance is beautifully interpreted in Ghosh's rustic lyrics, Gulzar's damp poetry and Debojyoti Mishra's classically soaked minimalist compositions.

Using the separation of Radha and Krishna as a metaphor, Ghosh exudes the sentiments of the eternally star-crossed lovers in his two protagonists in all the songs.

Mathura nagarpati is about a nostalgic Krishna leaving behind the political arena of his birthplace to seek solace in the tranquil milieu of Gokul, only to discover things are not the way they used to be.

A tremble of thunder, a swish of piano and the poignant voice of Hariharan tenderly protests Piya tora kaisa abhiman, a haunting classic that laments aloud why pride should come in the way of love.

There is something ethereal about Shubha Mudgal's voice. Her flawless, passionate rendition of anticipation in Raha dekhe and loneliness in Akele hum nadiya kinare stirs the imagination, creating a breathtaking visual. Credit must also go to composer Debojyoti Mishra, who lets Mudgal take center stage and allows the arrangement to take back seat.

Mishra, who has previously worked with Ghosh on films like Bariwali, Titli and Chokher Bali, is in perfect sync with his director's concept. Almost all the songs but for Hamari galiyan hoke aana and Jog jiye are an extension of the same thought pattern -- unfulfilled love and the heartache of separation.

Shehnais and dholaks take over the wedding celebration, Hamari galiyan hoke aana. If the former celebrates the bride, the bridegroom gets his share of blessings in the ethnic Jug jiye.

The music of Raincoat recreates the innocent magic and spirituality of Radha-Krishna's immortal romance. If you appreciate melody and poetry in its purest sense, Raincoat is a must buy.

01 November, 2004 - Raincoat: A Monsoon Romance (dcealumni.com)

After making many movies for the Bengali Cinema, noted director Rituparno Ghosh is trying his luck with his first Hindi movie ‘Raincoat’ starring Aishwarya Rai and trustable Ajay Devgan. Raincoat is a intense drama set in one rainy afternoon when two lover estranged by fate meet under strange circumstances.

Last year Rituparno Ghosh made it big when he casted Aishwarya in the Bengali film ‘Chokher Bali’. The film made it to London Film festival. Those who liked Chokher Bali would be eagerly waiting for ‘Raincoat’, because in this movie Ghosh is experimenting with a Hindi lingual film for the first time.

Aishwarya who is working with Rituparno Ghosh for the second time after Chokher Bali feels that Ghosh is a fabulous director. Aishwarya dons the role of a traditional Bihari housewife with simplicity. Her looks are completely different from that seen in her recent outing, ‘Bride and Prejudice’.

27 October, 2004 - 'Raincoat' postponed because of Ajay Devgan (planetbollywood.com)

It came as a surprise when for no apparent reason the Ajay-Aishwarya starrer ´Raincoat´ was postponed from October 22 to November 26. According to our sources the postponement was because of Ajay Devgan.

Apparently Devgan who has not had a release for a long time wanted ´Raincoat´ to release at least 4 to 5 weeks away from ´Bride & Prejudice´ because of obvious comparisons due to Aishwarya featuring in both the movies.

The director Rituparno Ghosh who was not very happy with the development initially, now feels that it is indeed a blessing in disguise. Ghosh also says that ´Raincoat´ won't be affected by ´Musafir´ though it releases on the same day because "it has a totally different setup."

23 October, 2003 - Rituparno Ghosh’s Raincoat (screenindia.com)

The tremendous shot that Rituparno Ghosh gets in the arm comes after he has won the prestigious National award for his film Choker Bali, frilled by the presence of Aishwarya Rai, the heavy-weight heroine of Bollywood. Choker Bali has been adjudged as the ‘Best’ Bengali film by the jury members of the 51st National Film Awards, 2003. The citation says: “The award for the Best feature film in Bengali for the year 2003 is given to Choker Bali for its operatic play of passion breaking norms and taboos”.

His next film Raincoat (Hindi) is already in circulation in festival circuits and the film again has two Bollywood heavy-weights like Ajay Devgan and Aishwarya Rai. It is almost ‘a three-character-film’ and bears in the wee nucleus a love tale, an romantic encounter. According to Rituparno Ghosh, the film revolves round Manoj (Ajay Devgan) and Neeru (Aishwarya Rai), the lovers who parted and settled in Kolkata. Though originally from Bhagalpur, Bihar, they suddenly, in a very strange situation, meet on a rainy day when Manoj knocks at Neeru’s door.

Rituparno Ghosh said, “Major space in the film is lent to the two lovers caught in a midday and the love-escapade occupies spacio-temporal situation. Nearly 60 per cent of the film covers a time set in a midday capturing the lovers, a room and the landlord. Initially, I was a little apprehensive. But I was inspired to get on to the project after I saw a film called Encounter, involving Van Gogh, which has a journalist and an actress as performing artistes. And literally, the film covers a modest time-lapse of an afternoon and evening. And that’s all. I felt charged to renew my confidence thinking why can’t I?”

Dream! Well, it’s the word/image that haunts Rituparno Ghosh to the edge of his imagination as a thinker. His respite does not fructify unless he takes an orphic journey within it. He said, “I think, to create a perfect dream in a film is the dream of every filmmaker. Because, dreams are the most enticing items of life that a filmmaker can create. We all remember Bergman’s dream sequences. Dreams have shaped many filmmakers’ minds; of course, sometimes these have been used as an essay resort to give a psychological flourish to the film. But to create a credible dream is very difficult because we do not have the technology”. Is it really related so much to technology? Many may contend the point/view and others quite well chime in with him. By technology, he wants to stress that dreams are often blurred and one dream rolls into another. To execute it in the visual form which touches your senses intangibly is very difficult. “I myself dream a lot”, noted Rituparno Ghosh, “dreams which are very convoluted and non-linear”. As for him, he tends to employ this ‘non-linear’, roundabout format in a very illuminating manner, bringing in its wake, a change in the given time and space. An osmosis to be sure.

Choker Bali is a period piece film and it is based on Tagore’s novel. So it needed a different treatment, costume, acting, movement and rhythm. The same is not true in case of Raincoat. Here lies a big hiatus, hiatus of time and space. Characters too are products of modern time. So one must take note of the film ambience that may be visible in the new film. According to him here the protagonist woman character is a very ordinary one with no glamour or chic, just a middle-class housewife. But she has many shades and psychological contours and shifts through it with her own tropical sensibility. Said he, “This is what has made the character interesting and at the same time extremely challenging”. According to him, it is very difficult to portray the ‘myriad doubts and conflicts’ in so simple a character. Yes, Rituparno has some constraints to transmute his script, primarily done in Bengali, into Hindi. He had tried with some one but it never clicked duo to its darn bookish translation, quite pedantic and grave. He did not want it. For him, flexibility of the language/script in Hindi is much more important and required to suit the aesthetics of the theme and demands of time. The Hindi script that finally took shape and got his inner consent gets further topicalised with modern/quotidian inflection. Being satisfied with the final upshot, he truly started shooting the film. And he has completed it with panache and ingenuity. It is claimed Ajay Devgan, finding fastidiousness and jitters of the director, came forward to add his side to make it sound perfect. It means while acting, Ajay Devgan, in his familiar fashion, uses the dialogue with that Hindi vocabulary, with inflection very contemporary and meaningful. “It is Ajay”, said Rituparno Ghosh, “who has helped me a lot to gain on the film language, colloquial and ordinary”.

About making of the film in Hindi, Ghosh maintained, “I have enjoyed making the film in Hindi and the making of the film appeared very, very challenging and funny at times. It’s an amazing exercise for me. Had I done it in Bengali, it would have felt heavy, sloppy but making it in Hindi provides me desperate satisfaction because, it is so taut, laconic and sharp to the point, the way I had wanted it to do. According to him, the film has some songs (Bollywood style!) which he has penned himself. There is no denying the fact, said he, that he has wanted these songs to be used/lipped by my characters. Said he, “It is a love story, my protagonist is a married woman but the male character is a loner. It has the semblance of mythic Radha-Krishna elements. Words of the songs have been written in padabali mixing Bhojpuri, Maithili dialect. And I believe Hindi film demands songs since it has its own markets. So I cannot ignore it altogether. To turn it into an artistic work is my responsibility. And this is a stark reality. One must admit it and agree with me”.

Rituparno Ghosh is considered to be the ‘most verbose’ filmmaker of the contemporary times. His films are burdened with tons of words, dialogues and sounds. There is so little role of silence in his work. In nine of his films, he seems to have survived on verbosity of dialogue and thick field-sounds and random artificial sounds. His admirers too look agitated/dischuffed with his way of making the work heavy, sometimes too heavy to bear. Besides, his films bear sexual connotation making it a pivot, at times, to big-note his position. It peaks in Choker Bali, a film of interrelationships of four young men and women. To be frank, spice of sexual splurge is infused into the texture of the film, contradicting Tagore’s tone in the novel. Sexual motif as depicted in Tagore’s novel written in 1901 is quite soft, unnoticeable and subtle. But in the film the same has been overplayed with an eye to provide titillation to the public sentiments. Things like sexual proclivity, urge to libido, wild passion and rabid sexual slants/infatuation of four characters do never justify Tagore’s sketch. This is unfortunate. But Rituparno Ghosh has his own take. He thinks otherwise and offers his interpretation which the scholars of Tagore’s works pan heavily. They feel it is a sheer distortion of what Tagore had conceived on quadrangular love and its conflicts. In a way Choker Bali is a continuation to his earlier film Bariwali so far as sexual deprivation is concerned. According to him Choker Bali is a ‘favourite’ of his work and he wanted to make a film of it for a long time. It is a period piece and he had wanted to go just 100 years back to get the feel of his dream. He has admitted almost out of frustration, he selected Choker Bali as the film within film in Bariwali, giving him a ‘vicarious pleasure’ to do the film through the filmmaker, his protagonist. He said that he needed an equally “psychological complex film” for Bariwali against which the characters of Bariwali would play their psycholoically complex roles. “So Choker Bali”, he contended, “became the inevitable choice. Sexual deprivation of both Binodini and Banalata also provide the two characters. So I think Choker Bali has played a very significant role in shaping my mind”.

Is his maiden Hindi film Raincoat made and intended to widen his film market? Or is it just to flaunt the glamour of Aishwarya Rai and macho image of Ajay Devgan? One cannot find an easy answer. But the director feels that there is a common thread of ‘Indian culture’ to be found in various parts of the country, despite language divide. Said he, “Our confusion snowballs on the question of making Hindi films because we think sometimes we are inferior in the language and hence we fail to deliver the goods. But it is not true. Since we have the idea of Hindi culture or culture common to all over India, a syntax or a vocabulary emerges. And we can use it meaningfully in our films whatever the language.” He has lamented the fact that “we have always deemed the Hindi language as inferior one and unsuitable for our culture. No it is not true. This conventional notion about Hindi needs to be chucked out from our minds. Why should we feel inferior while speaking Hindi? We mock ourselves for the same. This is ridiculous. This cultural superiority of ours is nothing but a fundamentlist idea and it needs to shaken off”.

Right at the moment he is making another period piece film called Antarmahal. Here again, he seems to be taking up a subject embedded in a time when feudalism rules supreme. This is where one can look back at Satyajit Ray and his films like Jalsaghar and Shatranj Ke Khilari. His new film Antarmahal, according to him, may be taken as one to stir the hornet’s nest. This is one film that takes up the issue of patriarchy in a renewed vision. One hopes his new work does not appear pathologically verbose, like in the past and that he should refuses to be self-indulgent for the sake of his mental obsession.

19 October, 2004 - Will Ash be Devgan's 'Raincoat'? (timesofindia.com)

After doing the balle balle Punjabi kudi act, garbed in sequined kurtas and Patiala suits in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice, it is time for Aishwarya Rai to go east.

Playing the role of a Bihari girl married and settled in Calcutta, Rai will sport minimalist make-up and Neeta Lulla-designed sarees in Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh's forthcoming Raincoat.

As Rai recovers from international critics' not-so-kicked response to B&P, she's keeping fingers crossed that Raincoat will help her smile at the Box Office.

And another person who will be hoping the same apart from director Ghosh, (who earlier directed her in Chokher Bali) is Rai's co-actor Ajay Devgan, who has not had great Company since 2002, where debutant Vivek Oberoi got the kudos for an impressive portrayal.

This year, Devgan's last outing was Mani Ratnma's Yuva, where again Abhishek Bachchan walked away with all the credit and left Kajol's better-half sulking. His other releases included adult comedy Masti, where the triumvirate Vivek Oberoi-Aftab Shivdasani-Ritesh Deshmukh stole the show and Devgan remained in the background.

With Raincoat, Devgan and Rai have been paired for the fourth time. The only time that their pairing worked was in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's magnum opus Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam in 1999. Pitted as the conscientious and too-much-in-love-with wife kind of a husband, Devgan did the martyr act convincingly.

Although his sensitive lawyer act, who takes his beautiful wife across seven seas to be reunited with her the real-life-cum-reel lover Salman Khan earned him applause, critics were not so kind.

Most credited the film's runaway success to Ash-Sallu onscreen chemistry, which was spilling over from their off-screen passion and good music and excellent cinematography.

Then happened Hum Kisise Kum Nahin in 2002, which was a box office dud, in spite of boasting of a star cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt and Rai.

A weak adaptation of Robert de Niro's Analyse This, it came as a cropper at the box office. Rai and Devgan's next pairing was in Rajkumar Santoshi's cop drama Khakee , where again Bachchan as an ageing cop and Akshay Kumar as a crooked cop outshone Devgan's cop-turned-baddie act.

Reasonably so. Although Devgan and Rai were supposed to be reel lovers, it was Akki who managed to romance Aishwarya and did a convincing job of trying to woo her endless, even falling for her deceptive act.

In the wake of such a chemical combination, Raincoat will test whether the duo can get lucky on screen.

29 September, 2004 - Kudos for Raincoat (telegraphindia.com)

Indian directors are set to make a big impact at the London Film Festival, with Shyam Benegal’s Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero being one of the highlights.

“This is a very important film, a three-and-three-quarter hour historical epic,” said the British Film Institute’s Cary Rajinder Sawhney, who helped choose most of the Indian entries.

Sawhney also spoke highly of Raincoat, made by the “celebrated Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh”, which stars the ubiquitous Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgan who give “virtuoso performances as two fated lovers”.

Sawhney described it as “an intense romantic drama with Chekovian hues”.

“These performances show that actors and actresses from Bollywood are more than able to match Hollywood,” observed Sawhney.

Now that Manmohan Singh and Tony Blair agreed in their recent joint declaration that there should be increased co-operation in the field of film production, there will be added interest in a conference on Indo-British collaborations in making movies organised by the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on October 29.

Sawhney, who is to chair the conference, said: “Subhash Ghai, Mira Nair, Shyam Benegal and others coming to the film festival will be there.”