Rituparno Ghosh’s Raincoat
by: Pradip Biswas
- 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.
