Exclusive: First Look at Bengali movie Shukno Lanka by Shoma Chatterji

Berlinale 2007. Noted Indian filmmaker Joy Sundar Sen (Sabyasachi Chakraborty) picks up yet another award for his Bengali film, Swapna Sundari. During the festival, Sen meets Isabella (Emma Brown), a young European actress of the Italian film La Tournee.  Sen and Isabella share a bond of mutual respect and understanding that cuts neatly across man-made schisms of age and culture. Sen chances upon a book of short stories by filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak in a Berlin bookstore and his creative juices begin to flow again. He decides to make a film called The Philosopher’s Stone, authored by late Ghatak. It is a story of a man who has hit upon a magic formula to bring dead people alive. But he has no clue about who he will cast in the role of this strange man. He chooses to cast an ageing junior artiste named Chinu Nandy (Mithun Chakraborty) to enact this role. Nandy is a man who stepped into films to become a hero because he “looked like Uttam Kumar from behind” but has reconciled himself over time to remain content as a junior artiste in Bengali cinema, warts and all. He is more surprised than thrilled though his wife and the low-middle-class neighbourhood he lives in are happy about the media attention he is subjected to suddenly. Sen’s producer backs out mid-way because Sen’s film, he feels, lacks commercial viability. So, Sen summons Isabella for help and she steps in happily.

“Shukno Lanka is a red chilly, an integral yet completely invisible aspect of the quintessential curry without which no Indian curry can be considered compete and authentic. It stands as a metaphor for our hero, Chinu Nandy, who has worked as a junior artiste in films for many years. No film can be made without junior artistes. Yet, the junior artiste, like the red chilly, remains invisible, unheard of and unsung,” says director Gaurav Pandey as he explains the intriguing title of the film.

Does this sudden thrust to fame change Chinu’s perspective on life and cinema in any way? Do the people in the industry treat him differently? Outwardly they do, but as shooting progresses, Chinu discovers that his status quo as junior artiste has not really changed so far as Sen’s attitude towards him is concerned. He is only an actor Sen chose because he fit into the director’s conception of the character. As journalist Amol Sharma writes: “As India rapidly modernizes, the country's filmmakers are struggling to find movie extras who look the part.” Isabella, a microcosm of the global woman, is the only person in the unit who treats Chinu Nandy with empathy and respect.

Director Gaurav Pandey offers a small slice of the repercussions of globalization on Indian regional cinema and the people who inhabit it from an internationally recognised filmmaker like Joy Sundar Sen, through an Italian actress played by Emma Brown, to a small-time junior actor like Chinu Nandy, his wife, the local boys who continue to pull his leg mercilessly and the flim-flams in the synthetic world of films.

Pandey has used an imaginative and aesthetic framing device of a night-long journey across the deserted streets of Kolkata undertaken by Chinu and his wife Bela on a landau, a decorated, horse-drawn carriage. “It is a special ride Chinu has planned to take with his wife. The story reveals itself in the course of the ride. The ride is metaphorical. It provides a contrast to the journey that internationally renowned filmmaker Joy Sundar Sen and Isabella take to bring their new film Paraspathar, based on a short story penned by filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak to life. The ride is a means of Chinu Nandy’s reaching out to his wife and to his dream. It is a trigger to his fantasies and illusions. It is a voyage from night to day, from darkness to light, and from death to life. It is a trip towards light, towards the crowning glory of all our lives. The focus is on the irony of our lives. The film is non linear- - travelling between and among time, space and lives, effortlessly. What binds it together is the tragi-comic tale of Nandy and the haunting spaces of the city of Kolkata,” Pandey philsophises.

Mithun Chakraborty could never give up on his Bengali roots – Kolkata, the place he grew up in and Bangla, his mother tongue. He keeps flitting between Mumbai and Kolkata to keep his feet firmly planted in both cities, work-wise. He is perfectly comfortable playing a mafia don in Rehmat Ali as he is playing junior artiste Chinu Nandy in Shukno Lanka. “Shukno Lanka is not exactly a mainstream film but I play a character I have never played before. I play a marginal man who once nourished great dreams of making it big in films. With time, he reconciles himself to remain a junior artiste. He has no illusions left, much less – dreams. But his life changes when an internationally renowned Bengali director approaches him and asks him to play the lead in a film. So, I sometimes change my criteria of accepting an assignment mainly on its prospects of commercial viability when a film like Shukno Lanka comes along,” says Mithun.

Shukno Lanka is a global film in every sense of the term. It opens on an international film festival in Berlin. An Indian filmmaker picks up another international award. He meets an Italian actress that has been portrayed by an Englishwoman. They pick up a book by Ghatak in English translation in a Berlin bookshop. The film has been directed by Gaurav Pandey who lived across the globe and India and who is Bengali more by adoption than by genealogy or birth. The cinematographer, Mahesh Aney is from Mumbai who has never worked on a Bengali film in Kolkata before. “Within this global framework, Shukno Lanka is the story of every man’s basic greed to become immortal, to keep on living beyond death through his visible image – on screen, through a photograph, a painting, a charcoal sketch, whatever. The film has no definite beginning, middle or end. It is a pastiche of people’s lives as looked at by an outsider. I consider myself to be the quintessential outsider living in Mumbai and working now in Kolkata. The ride is metaphoric. It provides a contrast to the journey that Sen and Isabella take to bring Parash Pathar to life,” Pandey sums up.