Mrinal Sen mastered the film-within-a-film format: Colleagues

KOLKATA: The memories are a little more than 35 years old. Yet, they seem like events from yesterday. Mrinal Sen had gone to shoot ‘Akaler Sandhane’ — a movie on how a film crew arrives in a village to make a film on 1943’s Bengal famine. During shooting, Smita Patil, Gita Sen and Sreela Mazumder shared a room in a dilapidated zamindarbari in Bolpur. Every night, Patil and some other unit members would climb up a rickety staircase to go to a terrace for parties.But teenage Mazumder couldn’t escape Gita Sen’s vigilant eyes and enter the forbidden adda zone. News of these regular escapades soon reached Sen’s ears.
On the master film-maker’s 92nd birthday, Sreela fondly recalls, “Mrinal-da never stopped anyone from indulging in parties over things that went up in smoke… All he said was: ‘This place has snakes all around. So, it’s best not to stray out of your rooms at night!’”
That’s Sen. The last of the Mohicans who had once advised his ‘AS’ and ‘Padatik’ actor — Dhritiman Chatterjee — not to mention his age once he crossed 50. “When I had e-mailed him on his 80th birthday, he had replied saying: ‘If people ask your age on your birthday, say you are one year older than what you were last year,” says Chatterjee. Away on a month-long vacation to Himachal Pradesh, Chatterjee will call up Sen today to tell the master director that he remains one of his ‘most favourite people on earth!’
Even with minimal dialogues, Mazumder’s powerful performance as Durga in ‘AS’ got noticed and landed her an offer in ‘Mandi’. “On that set, Mrinal-da sent two letters to Shabana (Azmi) and Smita. Separately, both told me: ‘Chhutki, Mrinal-da had mistakenly sent letters to the wrong recipient’. But when I informed Mrinal-da, he smiled to say it was intentional prank! Shabana had got a letter addressed to Smita saying the news be kept a secret that he had cast her in his next film and vice versa!’” recalls Mazumder, who’ll visit Sen at his residence today.
Many believe that through Chatterjee’s role of a director in ‘AS’, Sen came closest to representing his anxieties about the film-making process. “Many scenes weren’t written before shooting. Two scenes had spot-improvisations,” Chatterjee says. A sudden shower was instantly incorporated in the movie.
For Dipanker De, an offer to act in one Sen film (‘AS’) was a privilege. “He’d ask me to perform the scene my way and correct if necessary. While Ray followed a classical approach, Mrinal-da was spontaneous and realistic,” says De. Today, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s line from ‘Crime and Punishment’ — ‘I bow down not to you, Sonya, but to the suffering humanity — reminds De of Sen’s political beliefs in his anti-establishment films. “That he didn’t support exploitation of any form is reflective in not just ‘AS’ but his other works too,” De says.
In the second half of the 80s, Sen and Chatterjee had discussed an idea about a film where a movie unit goes visiting that village some 20 years later. By then, advent of TV channels and phones had resulted in a change in the consciousness of people. “Mrinal-da’s idea for a possible film was never divorced from the social reality,” says Chatterjee. Unfortunately, the film never got made.
Down the years, the film-within-a-film format became a favourite in Bengali cinema. The world of cinema got framed in films like ‘Bariwali’, ‘Angshumaner Chhobi’, ‘Abohomaan’, ‘Autograph’, ‘Houseful’, ‘Nayika Sambad’ and ‘Shobdo’. Yet, why has the heights reached by ‘AS’ remained untouched? De, who gave a fine performance in ‘Abohomaan’ wouldn’t encourage comparative discussions. Mazumder, who has done six films with Sen, won’t find faults in contemporary directors. Instead she remembers Sen’s uniqueness in showing how cinema and life blend together in the movie. As a parting shot, she says, “These films usually follow a certain format. It required Sen’s political consciousness to conceive an ‘AS’.”