I have chosen a career which has heartbreak written into it: Aparna Sen

Aparna Sen remembers being very nervous on the day 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) premiered in Kolkata’s Elite cinema hall. She sat with the projectionist in his room, making him miserable. “I kept saying this is too loud, that’s too soft. He was indulgent, but, finally, when the film ended and I started fretting about why the audience hadn’t responded, he grew irritable and said, ‘They are all still there, aren’t they? Relax!’” Sen was swamped with applause that day. In 1961, her performance in Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya augured a starry future, but with 36 Chowringhee Lane, she had firmly arrived.Even though Sen never did fully hang up her acting boots, it’s her filmmaking oeuvre—one that includes sharp, compelling films like Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002) and 15 Park Avenue (2005)—that defines her career. With her new film, The Rapist, set to premiere at the Busan International Film Festival (October 6-15), the director says she doesn’t suffer the nerves she once did. After Sati (1989) was pulled from cinemas in a fortnight, she was devastated, but when The Japanese Wife (2010) didn’t reach the audiences she had hoped for, Sen began to distance herself from the reception of her films. She says, “I put in my everything, every ounce of my energy and passion into the film, but I also detach myself from it. I know I have chosen a career which sort of has heartbreak written into it.”Speaking about The Rapist, Sen doesn’t want to give too much away, but she talks about how one fell swoop of an event dramatically changes the lives of her three protagonists (played by Konkona Sensharma, Arjun Rampal and Tanmay Dhanania). “As a director, what I found enjoyable was to strip away the facades, the belief systems and tensions that people have, and get to the person underneath, the one deep inside.” Sen is sure that her film, one which sees disparate Indias compete and collide, will be a “conversation starter”. She adds, “There will be arguments, and I think that’s a good thing. The more interpretations there are about a film—good, bad, indifferent—I feel the richer it becomes.” A still from Aparna Sen's latest film 'The Rapist' (2021) Sen, 75, feels she has a new idea for a film every day, but the story of The Rapist, she says, had come to her some 15 years ago. In Applause Entertainment and Quest Films, she finally found “very, very supportive producers”, and in her daughter Konkona a lead who was “very straightforward” and didn’t give her grief over dates. “It took me a while to realise that the film wasn’t as grim as I had thought. It’s all about relationships, and what an incident of rape does to them. That’s my strength, relationships.”While making The Rapist, Sen read several books that attempted to make sense of sexual violence. Though she speaks of rape’s relation to power and human cruelty with well-informed certainty, her arguments often circle back to the morality of capital punishment. “Putting people to death is such a medieval way of dealing with crime,” she says. “But nothing is black and white, nor am I. Reading a story about a Dalit girl being raped, I recently felt the man doesn’t deserve to live.”Many of Sen’s references are newsy. She spends time discussing the 2019 encounter killings of rapists in Hyderabad. She brings up Asifa Bano, the eight-year-old who in January 2018 was gang-raped and murdered in Kashmir’s Kathua region. Since Sen’s last film, Ghawre Bairey Aaj (2019), was also inspired by the death of Gauri Lankesh, the question is, perhaps, relevant—are news bulletins now the best catalyst for her imagination? “Somebody asked me, ‘Why don’t you make a film like 36 Chowringhee Lane again?’ I said because the world has changed so much that it has made me part of its flux, too.”Though Sen had once broken through an almost entirely male clutter of filmmakers, she wears her triumph lightly. “In the beginning, there were three of us—Sai Paranjpye, Vijaya Mehta and me. Mira Nair came after, and later, Deepa Mehta. Today, there’s Zoya Akhtar, Farah Khan, Alankrita Srivastava, Konkona Sensharma, Geetu Mohandas, Nandita Das! You can just rattle off names.” Sen laughs when asked if she thinks she might have paved the way for them. “36 Chowringhee Lane was the first film to show a kiss, you know. I would say that much like it, I just happened to be one of the first ones.”Published By: Vishakha SharmaPublished On: Oct 2, 2021--- ENDS ---

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