However, it would be wrong to suggest that the two talented directors are like the two sides of a coin. While Rituparno Ghosh, 35, is caught between two offers, 48-year-old Maloy Bhattacharya is waiting for an offer.
The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and the renowned Hindi filmmaker Basu Chatterji want the services of Rituparno to make a film but he is yet to decide which to take up first. Whereas Maloy has already finished doing the first draft of the script for his next film and is now working on another story but does not know where the finance is going to come from.
Rituparno and Maloy came into the limelight in 1995
with their maiden films ; the former made Unishe April which
bagged the Golden Lotus Award in 1995 while Maloy burst into the
scene with Kahini (The story) which was included in the
Thiruvananthapuram festival's Indian Panorama section. Rituparno
went on to make Dahan (Burning) but Maloy who took five years to
complete his first film is a little worried that no concrete
proposal has come his way since then.Maloy, tall and enbonyhued, looks every inch a Heman. On the other hand, the medium-built Rituparno barely stands out in a crowd. Rituparno learnt the craft of filmmaking when he made about 15 ad flicks for the Response ad agency between 1985 and 1995. Even after the roaring success of Unishe April, he still moonlights as a copy writer to earn his daily bread. Maloy, basically an art school product, made his name as a graphic designer and still runs a tiny ad agency in Calcutta.
On the personal front, the two filmmakers are like chalk and cheese. Maloy, father of two teenage girls, says he is indebted to wife Chandramala, a graphic designer, for her support. But Rituparno wants to retain the freedom provided by bachelorhood.
In their films, already made and those on the anvil, they are mostly concerned about an individual's various emotions in poignant life situations-love, hate, anguish and jealousy seem to occupy the prime position.
The ready-for-release Dahan revolves around Jhinuk (Indrani Haider), a young woman who takes on a gang of rapists to save Romita (Rituparno Sengupta), a young housewife.The director then shows how the families of the women are gripped by a fear psychosis, indirectly pointing to the reign of rowdies in present-day Bengal.
Rituparno's next film Bariul, which he would soon
start filming, is about a spinster who lives in a palatial
building with a young maid and an effeminate old servant for
company. Rakhee is slated to play the middle-aged lady whose life
turns tumultuous after a film unit persuades her to give the
building on rent for a month.Not since novelist Saratchandra Chattopadhyay has anybody portrayed such powerful female characters in either fiction or cinema. Each of his films have women of substance Sarojini (Aparna Sen) and Aditi (Debashri Roy) in Dahan and Jhimik and Romita in Bariuli. So, it may not be an exaggeration to call him the greatest feminist of the current decade in Bengal.
Maloy's world, on the other hand, is almost totally male-dominated. Kahini is almost totally about Rajat, who is at the same time hero and anti-hero. The two stories he has in mind are also male oriented.
In the first, he talks about a director who ends his life leaving his last venture incomplete. No female character may play a pivotal role in the movie within the movie.
The other story discusses the violent death of a senior police officer who learns about a former terrorist masquerading as an innocent private tutor in his friend's house. His friend, whose family holds this person in high regard, comes in the way of the officer who wants to arrest the wanted man.
It is not difficult to see that murder, mystery and males dominate the themes of Maloy.
Though slightly distraught that he has been inactive for 15 months after Kahini was made, Maloy is far from depressed: 'I am not in any rat race. If 1 could do my first film at 47, then 1 can wait a few more years for the second."
One option before him is to make commercial movies ;
in fact, an offer to make such a film did come his way, but he
knew that it was not his cup of tea. The other possibility before
him is to make serious art films, with an eye on the film
festivals.It'll make me pro-establishment," Maloy speculated. "I'll become another festival-oriented director whose films are not shown in the country but fetch foreign exchange. The year 1 won't have any film for the festivals, 1 would become irrelevant at least for a short period."
His aim is to do neither but make enough money for his next ventures by selling the screening rights of Kahini in other countries. During the international festival in Thiruvananthapuram an official from NFDC approached him for the rights to market Kahini abroad. He now plans to approach NFDC for assistance to make his next movie.
"The Thiruvananthapuram festival has helped me in lots of ways," he says. It was during the festival that a representative of the Berlin Film Festival informed him that his film has been selected for their Discovery section, also known as Forum of Young Cinema section.
He was also approached by the authorities of the Rotterdam Film Festival, 'which is held a week before the one in Berlin, but he was forced to turn down the request.
For, the Berlin festival has a condition that it would show only films which had not been screened before in Europe. The Swiss film festival officials are also keen on bagging his film.
But Maloy is pinning his hopes on Berlin. The
lndo-German cultural organisation, Deutsche Indishe Geselshaft,
is taking him around all the towns and cities of Germany where
Kahini will be screened after the Berlin festival. He is now full
of hope that he will be able to repay the Rs 12 lakh loan that he
took for Kahini.The emergence of Maloy and Rituparno could not have happened at a better moment. Critics and film buffs have been lamenting about the lack of meaningful cinema when Kahini and Unishe April happened. They are Calcutta's best bets for the cinema of the nineties.