Girl uninterrupted

The recent box office hit Page 3 has rocketed her into the arrived club. She may have the girl-next-door look yet her acting ability speaks volumes. Saibal Chatterjee on the talented and confident Konkona Sen Sharma, who first made waves with Mr & Mrs Iyer and is now busy shooting for mother Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue.

Star sons and daughters are often spitting images of their illustrious parents. They have to countenance constant comparisons with the latter, usually to their grave disadvantage. But Konkona Sen Sharma has broken the mould. Actor-filmmaker Aparna Sen’s talented daughter has carved a niche and identity for herself – quickly and painlessly.

Says the young actress: "We share the same value system and beliefs, but I am unlike my mother," says the confident young actress. She is right. Nothing that Konkona has done so far on the screen has ever been remotely reminiscent of Aparna Sen, even when she shared screen space with her mother, as she did in Rituparno Ghosh’s spry Titli.

As a screen performer, Konkona, who bagged a National Award for her superbly modulated performance as a young Tamil Brahmin mother caught in a sudden communal conflagration in the critically acclaimed Mr & Mrs Iyer, has gone from strength to strength with each subsequent role that she has essayed.

The manner in which she effortlessly slipped into the skin of the character of a cub reporter on the night-life beat in Madhur Bhandarkar’s commercially successful Page 3 is a reflection of her amazing suppleness as an actress. Give Konkona any role. She makes it her own.

From Meenakshi Iyer of Mr & Mrs Iyer to Madhavi Sharma of Page 3, Konkona has, in a span of five films, achieved a range that lesser actresses take a lifetime to attain. The box office success of Page 3 has predictably turned Konkona into hot property in Bollywood. Big banners are making a beeline for her, but Konkona has her feet firmly on the ground. She is happy taking on one film at a time.

Not since Jaya Bhaduri burst on the Indian popular cinema scene as the quintessential girl-next-door has a "Plain Jane" stirred the imagination of the audiences and filmmakers alike to the extent that Konkona has. She is now just a step away from the Bollywood mainstream.

"I have nothing against doing a Bollywood potboiler if the script and my character are interesting enough," says the actress who is currently shooting in Kolkata alongside the legendary Waheeda Rehman and Shabana Azmi for her mother’s new film, 15 Park Avenue. She awaits the release of her "first non-issue film", Siddharth Srinivasan’s Amavas, a supernatural drama shot primarily in a Delhi farmhouse.

Another of her recent releases, Amu, directed by the Los Angeles-based Shonali Bose, dealt with a non-resident Indian girl coming to grips with the impact of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots on her life. Her roles in films like Mr & Mrs Iyer and Amu have given Konkona a bit of an "activist" tag a la Shabana Azmi, but she is hardly comfortable with it, not the least because it is really way off the mark.

Konkona began her adult acting career with two Bengali films that had nothing to do with any burning socio-political issue. In Subrata Sen’s Ek Je Achhe Kanya, she was a teenager besotted with an older man and in Titli, she played a girl smitten by a charismatic film star who was once her mother’s boyfriend.

What the two films demonstrated in ample measure was her natural ability to etch out convincing human portraits, a trait that she has carried into her subsequent performances. Both Mr & Mrs Iyer and Amu required her to master accents alien to her. As Meenakshi Iyer in the former, she ensured that her Tamil Brahmin accent did not ever slip into the realms of caricature.

The fact that director Aparna Sen is a stickler for perfection helped. "I could never have done the role quite as effectively without her," admits Konkona. "I needed her guidance to deliver the best." Konkona and her mother, of course, share a special bond and a set of artistic values.

Indeed, Konkona’s early acting career was closely linked to her mother’s work. Her first role as a child actor was as a four-year-old in Dinen Gupta’s Indira (1983), which featured Aparna Sen in the lead role. Some years later, her mother directed her in the telefilm Picnic, while grandfather, veteran film critic and director Chidananda Dasgupta gave her a role in his Amodini (1994). Since then, Konkona has emerged from the shadows.

In Amu, she plays a girl who speaks the English language with a distinct American twang. Konkona reveals that, for the sake of authenticity, director Shonali Bose originally wanted an Indian-American actress for the part. But after auditioning Konkona, she changed her mind. Konkona, as always, sounded just right for the role.

Konkona admits that the Page 3 experience was "quite different" though it was "pleasant and relaxed". Having worked primarily in low-budget art house films in Kolkata, she was accustomed to tighter schedules and pre-shoot workshops. Nothing of that sort happened with Madhur Bhandarkar’s film. "I would fly into Mumbai every other month, do some work and fly back," she recalls.

The hard work has paid off. "I believed in Page 3 as I believe in every film that I take up," says Konkona. "I am really happy that the film has appealed to the audiences."

Since Page 3 clicked at the box office, Konkona has had another multiplex release – Manu Rewal’s satiric Chai Paani Etc, in which she plays a double role, one of them of a young documentary filmmaker who must cut through miles of red tape in order to realise her dream.

One of her avowed dreams was to work with Mira Nair. She had been cast as Ashima Ganguly in the internationally acclaimed director’s upcoming adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake. But Konkona has opted out of the film because the schedules clashed with the shoot of 15 Park Avenue.

It is a measure of her confidence that she has taken the turn of events in her stride. "Such things are a part of career decisions," she says. "There was no way I could adjust my dates. I am sure I will get another opportunity to work with Mira Nair."

She opted to sacrifice The Namesake for reasons that are easy to understand. Apart from the fact that it is her own mother who is making it, 15 Park Avenue gives Konkona a chance to act with two of the finest performers of Hindi cinema – Waheeda Rehman and Shabana Azmi – and reunites her with her Mr & Mrs Iyer co-star Rahul Bose.

"I had worked with Shabana Azmi before (in Picnic), but I had never imagined that I would one day share screen space with Waheeda Rehman," says Konkona. In 15 Park Avenue, the young actor plays a mentally challenged girl – a role that promises to push her to the limits of her ability. "It is one of the best scripts my mother has written," she says.

Given the trajectory her career has followed, it would be no bolt from the blue if Konkona springs another surprise with 15 Park Avenue. The mother-daughter combo has done it before.

Double bill

Konkona Sen Sharma’s mainstream Bollywood breakthrough represents two major developments. One, it marks the end of a long drought in popular Mumbai cinema of actresses born and groomed in Bengal. And two, it reopens Bollywood’s gates for non-conformist performers who went out of vogue with Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil.

While she is the latest addition to a long line of female screen performers from Kolkata who have made a mark in Hindi cinema – the tradition began way back in the 1930s with the inimitable Devika Rani – no actress groomed in Bengali films had made the transition to the glamour and glitz of the Mumbai film industry since Rakhee (Jeevan Mrityu, 1970), Jaya Bhaduri (Guddi, 1971) and Moushumi Chatterjee (Anurag, 1972) made their well-documented debuts.

There are, of course, a host of other Bengali actresses who are active in mainstream Bollywood today – Rani Mukherjee, Bipasha Basu, Sushmita Sen, Nandana Sen and Rimi Sen. But none of them has come to the world of popular Hindi cinema via Bengali films. Konkona is the only one.

That is what links her to the tradition that produced the likes of Suchitra Sen, Sharmila Tagore and Jaya Bhaduri. Both Sharmila and Jaya were Satyajit Ray discoveries who went on to carve their own niches in Mumbai films as actresses of extraordinary calibre.

Incidentally, Konkona’s mother Aparna Sen, too, made her acting debut in the early 1960s in a Ray classic, Teen Kanya, featuring in the last episode of the three-in-one film. Many years later, in the mid-1970s to be precise, she forayed into Hindi films with titles like Imaan Dharam and Kotwaal Saab but without much success.

With Page 3, Konkona has broken the jinx that plagued her mother as well as other Kolkata actresses in the post-Jaya Bhaduri era. Making her debut in the low-budget Kolkata-made films like Ek Je Achhe Kanya and Mr & Mrs Iyer, she is today poised on the threshold of big-time Bollywood stardom.

There is, of course, one essential respect in which the current crop of Bengali actresses, in Bollywood, including Konkona herself, differs from the earlier generation – Suchitra Sen, Sharmila, Jaya, Rakhee and Moushumi Chatterjee. Most actresses of yore always had one foot firmly planted in the city of their origin – Kolkata.

Today’s Bengali actress is, in essence, far more cosmopolitan, far more peripatetic, having grown up in an ethos that is a mix of her cultural moorings and external influences. It is not surprising, therefore, that none of these girls bar one began her career in Bengali films.

Rani Mukherjee, a niece of Bengali star Debashree Roy, has always been a Mumbai girl. Konkona, too, spent her formative years in New Delhi. Sushmita Sen has never been a Kolkata resident. Nandana Sen, daughter of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, is at home in the world. Even Bong bombshells Bipasha Basu and Koena Mitra, who grew up in Kolkata, have built their careers as models and actresses outside their hometown.

Rimi Sen, last seen in the Yash Chopra-produced Dhoom, entered Hindi films with Malayali director Priyadarshan’s rib-tickler Hungama. She has since then gone on to act in the Kolkata-based poet-filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Bengali film Swapner Din (Chased By Dreams), but she remains a Bollywood glamour girl.

As for carrying the Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil legacy forward, Konkona has achieved what Nandita Das attempted and failed to do – gain acceptance as a mainstream Bollywood actress. Nandita did land several plum roles in commercial Hindi films, notably the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Aks and the Sanjay Dutt vehicle Pitaah. These films bombed at the box office and put paid to her Bollywood aspirations.

Konkona has begun her brush with mainstream Hindi cinema on a completely different page – a low-budget, realistic entertainer. The strategy seems to have paid off. — S.C.