It was the summer of 1966 when the then reigning matinee idol of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, strode straight into the cinephiles’ heart with his million-dollar smile and bewitching mannerisms, serenading his ladylove in Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (The Hero).
He emerged a man with a studied poise, endowed with those natural human instincts seldom noticed in a larger-than-life superhero. Stomping straight into the archives as one of the landmark films of Tollywood cinema, the critically acclaimed film continues to inspire filmmakers.
Cut to 2010, wherein three people join hands to remake this classic movie. The new-age helmer Srijit Mukherjee steers a clear masterstroke by zeroing in on such an innovative script for his debut Autograph. The film had its international premiere in the Showcase Section at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival 2010 on October 15. Back home, it released nation-wide with English subtitles on the same day. Catering to a pan-Indian audience, the movie hit the theatres in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Pune and Mumbai. It has also been selected for the prestigious 10th Annual Miaac Film Festival 2010, to be hosted in New York from November 10 till 14. The film has already been winning rave reviews and appreciation from the viewers and critics.
The subject of the movie underscores the point that current-day Bengali film directors are making a clean sweep by thinking out-of-the-box with a considerable choice of unusual themes and unconventional style of filming at their disposal. It seems, the “alternate celluloid productions with offbeat characters and real substance to brag of on board” have become the order of the day.
With the advent of multiplex culture, the realistic films are grabbing all minds and market-space. “May be it’s not always feasible to discard the running-around-the-trees affair with a no-brainer fare for commercial reasons, but stories with enough meat and meaningful content are being constantly churned out for the greater good of our region-specific industry,” insists Mukherjee, a student of economics and a former assistant to Aparna Sen and Anjan Dutt. From tackling serious number games to wielding the megaphone, Mukherjee quite conveniently shifted gears to answer his true calling that laid in the celluloid craft. “I did quit my statistician’s job but was simultaneously straddling with a couple of theatrical stints, staged back to back in Bangalore.
Having proved his mettle in the acting department with equal élan and prowess in both commercial pot-boilers and arthouse endeavours, Tollywood numero uno hero Prosenjit Chatterjee has been roped in to slip into the shoes of Arun Chatterjee, his onscreen avatar, in the modern-day adaptation. The name itself is, in turn, an allusion to Uttam Kumar’s original name. And today’s superstar has confidently stepped into the remake of yesteryear’s Nayak as Ajker Nayak (The Hero of Today). “It’s a blast from the past kind of a situation,” the director says. Titled Autograph, Mukherjee asserts that his film is different from Ray’s in many aspects and that there should be no comparisons between his and the master’s creation. “Here, we’ve taken recourse to Nayak for sheer referential purposes. We haven’t delved into it but adapted it for today’s times. Period. The process of remaking a classic has been shown and its resulting influences upon the maker as well as the cast-n-crew surfaces above. The audience should watch the film with an open mind,” Srijit sets the record straight.
The project encapsulates a riot of value-clashes, ethos of urban sensibilities, various shades of love and intimate relationships, insecurities, jealousies, heartfelt unreciprocated feelings, all juxtaposed into a single narrative matrix. Unveiling a casting coup of sorts, apart from the bankable hero Prosenjit, versatile Nandana Sen and the happening niche film actor Indraneil Sengupta have been pencilled into the ensemble starcast. “This is Indraneil’s fifth movie and he had earlier worked with eminent filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Janala and Atanu Ghosh’s Angshumaner Chhobi. His is a promising talent with great potential. I wanted a guy with fresh, young, unassuming, urban feel and a pair of stark honest eyes to express his internal angst and dilemma. And Indraneil aptly fitted the bill for this requisite criteria,” he acknowledges.
Dealing with a leading film hero’s mental tug-of-war between his personal privacy and his public life of super-stardom and celebrityhood, Autograph signs in a thought-provoking fare on celluloid to contemplate and discuss about. It is introspective of the industry insides, its alleys and mazy studio lanes, the cinemawallahs and their workings, the making of a film from its preparatory scripting stage to showcasing the same on the silver screen, the camera, sound, location, shooting floors, greenrooms, vanity vans, the sets, props, costumes, warpaint, the arclights, the posters, billboards and the ultimate action plus the final cut. To cut a long story short, the diverse paraphernalia of a film industry comes to the fore.
“The eternal universal truth suggests that it is always lonely at the top. Irrespective of the zone that a deified megastar belongs to, it is widely noticed that a quintessential hero tends to suffer from solitude when plonked upon the pinnacle of his success. When he becomes indispensable to a market and his brand-equity steals the show, he tries to identify himself as the end-all and be-all of the industry. Calling the shots himself and dictating his own terms, he often becomes egoistic and manipulative in his ways. Upstaging others, he always hogs the limelight to remain the unchallenged face of a prosperous entertainment industry. The hero then attains a demi-god status, surrounded by a milling sycophants. And then he prides in saying: ‘I am industry’”, Mukherjee says.
Autograph has a significant parallel sub-plot pegged around live-in relationships to focus on the contemporary lifestyle of city-bred couples. “Their friendship is borne out of blind trust but that trust is transient and unmasks its hollow pores in due course of time,” he reveals.
Veering the conversation to Indraneil’s character, which too, in fact, demands some logical thought in the film, Srijit summarises: “He plays a guy who leaves his job to make foray into the Tollywood tinselville as a filmmaker.”
A word of alert comes from the director’s end: “Autograph is not an abstruse arthouse film but a stylistically portrayed flick about mundane matters and the industry issues. And yes, if I ever have to make this film in Hindi, the protagonist has to be either Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh Khan.”