|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rituparno Ghosh, one of the most outstanding contemporary filmmakers in India who received international recognition and awards, passed away in his sleep of a heart attack at his Kolkata residence last week. He had just completed his new film Bomkesh starring filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh as detective Bomkesh Bakshi. His documentary on Rabindranath Tagore is yet to be premiered.
In a little over two decades, Rituparno Ghosh established himself as one of the best directors in contemporary Indian cinema. Though he largely worked in Bengali movies, his films broke geographical and linguistic barriers by reaching national and international film festivals. He made films in Hindi, Bengali and English and prayed of the day when the CBFC would grant certification on multi-lingual films in keeping with the demands of the time. The elder of the two sons of Sunil Ghosh, noted documentary filmmaker, he graduated in economics from Jadavpur University. Though he had no formal training in filmmaking, he set out to become one of the most creative and outstanding ad filmmakers in the country. He ventured into feature films after having made around 400 ad films, many of which won prestigious awards. Hirer Angti (1992) was produced by the Children’s Film Society of India. Though the film won an international award, it failed to get a public release in theatres. However, the film was later shown several times over at small festivals for children’s films and also on the small screen. The film looks like a product directed, put together rather by an amateur trying his hand in a new medium. It is slip-shod and half-heartedly handled. His brother Indraneel Ghosh is a national award-winning art director. Tapas Ganguly in a 1997 article wrote that he considered Rituparno Ghosh as one of the ‘inheritors’ of the Dasgupta-Sen-Ghosh legacy (1997) referring to Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Aparna Sen and Gautam Ghosh as his predecessors.
With his second film Unishe April (1995), Ghosh liberated the censored and distorted image of the screen mother from the taboos and constraints of patriarchal culture to place it as a subject of psychological study and sociological inspiration for a feminist reading. The film bagged the top award at the National Film Awards in 1995 and the best actress award for Debasree Roy. He had the rare ability to discover the inherent and unexplored talents of mainstream actresses and made them portray challenging roles that bagged National awards for them. Rituparna Sengupta won, along with Indrani Haldar, the best actress award and the same applies to Kirron Kher, who played the lead in Bariwalli based on Ghosh’s own story and script for which Sudipta Chakraborty won the best supporting actress award. Arjun Rampal won the best supporting actor award at the National Film Awards for his performance in Ghosh’s English film The Last Lear that featured Amitabh Bachchan in the male lead. Raakhee won the best supporting actress award for Shuvo Muhurat and Ananya Chatterjee got the best actress award for Abohomaan. "I try to analyse the reasons of vulnerability in a man or a woman," said Ghosh. "If I am to portray a man as a protagonist, I’ll have to establish why he is vulnerable, and only then, can I move on to the other aspects of the story." Unlike his earlier films, which focused entirely on women, Asookh, adjudged the best Bengali film of 1999, explores a father-daughter relationship. Unishe April depicts a danseuse who, it is believed, has sacrificed her family for her profession which leads to her later being held responsible by her daughter for the husband’s untimely death. He tacked Tagore’s works — Chokher Bali, Noukadubi and Chitrangada in his own way and took the risk of strong criticism from Tagore scholars. The family as portrayed in his films is counter to most perceptions of all conventional and traditional forms of this social institution. With Just Another Love Story, Memories in March and Chitrangada, we discovered the acting potentials of Ghosh who portrayed the pain and the struggle of people of alternate sexual orientation and their desperate longing to belong to the mainstream. His films have bagged around 20 National Awards and many more at the state and international levels. He presented top commercial actor Prosenjit as an actor of tremendous potential that remained untapped till Ghosh’s magic wand touched him for Unishe April, Dosar, Utsab, Khela and The Last Lear. There was a lot of creativity left in him. His untimely death is a great loss indeed.
|
||||
|
|
||||
