Rituparno dispels Ray angle

Director Rituparno Ghosh is not one who fails to notice his own mistakes. He believes his last release Shob Choritro Kalponik wasn’t created and marketed in a way that could prepare his ‘niche audience’ for a film with ‘some difference’.

“Shob Choritro Kalponik was different from all my past works. It was my foray into magic realism— a film which is not story-based. But the primary treatments and marketing techniques failed to give any hint of that to my audiences. All publicity materials had faces of icons like Prosenjit and Bipasha Basu. The publicity helped us get a good opening, but also misled a section of audience who know I am a good storyteller. They emerged out of theatres dissatisfied, and in no way could you ascribe this feeling to their supposed inability to understand Shob Choritro Kalponik. It’s just that they had a different expectation which I could not fulfill.” Ghosh said at a press conference on Friday.

“Faces of stars of the magnitude of Prosenjit and Bipasha raised expectations that conflicted with the film’s concept. That many didn’t like the film wasn’t any fault of theirs. We had been the ones deserving the blame.” he added.

The director, however, became cautious on being asked why he cast Prosenjit and Bipasha despite knowing their names might give rise to unsought expectations. “They are very good actors. That’s why I cast them.” was his answer. Shob Choritro Kalponik, produced and marketed by Reliance Big Pictures, received mixed reviews from the press.

Dispelling speculations that his new film Abohomaan, releasing on 22 January, explores the guessed relationship between late director Satyajit Ray and actor Madhabi Mukherjee, he said, “The relation between a director and his muse has always been a keen interest of the press, and a prevailing practice is to bring an ‘illegitimate’ angle to it. This bothers me. I felt extremely sad that they didn’t spare even a man like Satyajit Ray. The story of Abohomaan has no link with their lives, but it explores the chemistry between a director and his muse, which, to me, is eternal and pure, like the one that existed between Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, or Raj Kapoor and Nargis. ”

Ghosh was quoted by The Telegraph as saying, “He is about 60 years old, she is 25-26. She could well have been his son’s lover, and I have purposely kept it that way to dispel the notion that Abohomaan has anything to do with Satyajit Ray and Madhabi (Mukherjee). My film is not a sensational story of two important personalities.”

To elaborate on his claim, Ghosh gave an account of his experience of working with Aishwarya Rai. “During the filming of Chokher Bali, I got up close with her personality traits; the result was visible in my next film with her, Raincoat.  Now, that’s a pure and surreal relationship between a director and his favourite actress, his muse.”

Abohomaan, a Reliance Big Pictures production, casts Dipankar De, Jisshu Sengupta, Mamata Shankar, Ananya Chatterjee and Riya Sen among others.

Rituparno also mentioned that the importance of stories in his films was lessening every day, with Shob Choritro … being the first attempt at the departure from his usual fare, “With seventeen titles behind me, I feel I am en route to real cinema. I’m trying to change a bit in each new film. But will I ever be able to claim I’ve met the demands of real cinema? I don’t think so. Very few directors in the world can or will be able to do that. The overall quality of cinema is facing a downwardly trend all over the world.”


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