Trend Watch

THE CHANGING FACE OF BENGALI CINEMA
By Shoma A Chatterji
CALCUTTA: Gone are the days when Bengali cinema placed India on the world cinema map. There was also a time when Bengali films made it to Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Moscow and other prestigious international film festivals and brought home the best awards. While Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen were still ruling the roost, there emerged a group of young, intelligent and well-educated filmmakers who made their presence strongly felt, Gautam Ghose, Raja Mitra, Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Aparna Sen, among them. Commercially too, Bengali cinema was a hit with the masses, what with stars like Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen drawing tear-soaked handkerchieves from the audience.

Then, one fine day, Uttam Kumar died and part of Bengali cinema died with him. Never has the modern Bengali hero been able to replace him in terms of histrionics or charismatic screen presence.

Over the years, Bengali commercial cinema began to go through bad days, with a churning out of Mumbai clones where only the dialogue was in Bengali and the whole film was a straight copy of some, crudely made and shoddily plotted Hindi melodrama. With the near-death of parallel cinema, even good filmmakers ceased to do much work. The little they did, was exclusively targeted at international film festivals and they cared a hoot about mass audience acceptance. Neither of these augured well for the future of Bengali cinema.

Till, a few brainy directors in Tollygunje, the film centre of Calcutta, struck upon Bengali themes with Hindi masala like rape, violence, titillating sex, all nicely blended and ground into an acceptable mix of family melodrama. Among them, the foremost names are those of Anjan Choudhury, Prabhat Roy and Swapan Saha. They are noted for bringing out commercial films which inevitably put the box-office on fire each time. Sadly however, Mumbaiyya Bengalis who tried to make Bengali films in their home state to get back to their roots, were destined to face the biggest flops of their careers. Among them are Basu Chatterjee, Nitish Roy and Prabhat Roy. Happily though, none of the three have called it a day.

Of the big three, Prabhat Roy, who honed his skills in Mumbai with his directorial debut with a Hindi film, always has some element of social concern in his films. His scripts are tightly knit with few loopholes and at least one of them, Swetapathorer Thala, won the national award a few years ago. A couple of years back, Roy made Lathi on the younger generation’s increasing apathy towards their old parents with Victor Banerjee playing the protagonist who rebels against this kind of filial exploitation. Anjan Choudhury unspools a rags-to-riches story of a man who tried to eke out a respectable living out of running a tea-shop on the outskirts of Calcutta. With some encouragement from old friend, Ranjit Mullick, Anjan began to write stories and scripts for films. That turned out to be the turning point of a career that could now be termed as the Bengali equivalent of a David Dhawan career in terms of the films he churns out of his giant mixer-blender. He tries to keep it all in the family by choosing his daughters Chumki and Rina to play the female leads. Though neither have the looks for a starry career, nor the acting talent, his films fare very well at the box office. Of late, he has also roped in son-in-law Lokesh Ghosh, to act in his films.

Swapan Saha is like Alladin’s Lamp for Bengali cinema. He has worked the Indo-Bangladesh magic for Bengali films, injecting fresh blood into an industry that was weighed down by successive failures and the Great Bollywood Onslaught. He finishes films within the month and has not less than six releases every year, each of them thumping the box office. They are crudely made films, mainly with Rituparna Sengupta in the lead since she commands a great draw in Bangladesh, and are filled with ingredients that go into C-grade Hindi masala fare.

The industry is not sorry about this turn in the tide in average Bengali cinema simply because of the logic of sheer economics. After all, only with more films becoming hits can the industry sustain employment, and what’s worse, fewer hits would mean unequal competition from Mumbai.