Actor Neha Dhupia had said in 2004 that only sex and Shah Rukh Khan sell in Bollywood, a statement she reiterated after the success of Khan’s 2023 blockbuster action-thriller, Pathaan. For the Bengali film industry, Tollywood, it seems that only nostalgia and Allu Arjun sell, the latter much more than the former. There are three new films on the life of the auteur Mrinal Sen and his cinema, even as West Bengal eagerly awaits the release of Pushpa 2.
Before Sen, Tollywood seemed to be obsessed with Satyajit Ray and his books and films. Recently, Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar was brought back as a character in a new film by splicing scenes from his old films using AI tools. All these films have had varying degrees of success at the box office, much less than the business the Allu Arjun-starrer Pushpa: The Rise did by creating a storm in West Bengal, just like elsewhere in India.
As Bengal breathlessly awaits the release of Pushpa 2, a blasphemous question is doing a ‘Pushpa’ dance move inside the head: Does Tollywood need an Allu Arjun more than a Mrinal Sen today?
Sen and the Calcutta that no longer exists
In the late 1960s, when a young Mrinal Sen used to frequent the Paradise Café in south Kolkata for an adda on politics, revolution,and cinema over cups of tea and cigarettes with filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, music composer Salil Chowdhury, and stage lighting designer Tapas Sen, did he know Bengali cinema would keep him alive even in 2024, when Marxists are fetching zero seats in both Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Bengal? Or that trams and yellow taxis from the 1970s would fill up cinema theatre scenes even as electric cars become a thing?
Yes, nostalgia sells and drives film ticket sales as well. Which is perhaps why, apart from the love of Sen and his cinema, there are three new films around him. The trend began with National Award-winning director Kaushik Ganguly’s September 2023 release Palan, which is a sequel to Sen’s 1882 film Kharij. Sen’s Kharij was the story of an urban couple caught in a bind over the mysterious death of a servant boy not much older than their own child. Ganguly’s Palan shows the same couple, now old, and facing fresh existential crises. “The story of Palan resonates with the experiences of all houses in Kolkata. Every film can be revisited at different stages of life and I believe that while times are changing for the middle class, their underlying problems remain constant,” Ganguly said in an interview last year.
There is merit to Ganguly’s argument that some underlying problems do indeed remain constant, though his film tanked at the box office. Undeterred by Palan’s fate, there have been two more films on Sen. Anjan Dutt’s Chaalchitra Ekhon, released simultaneously in theatres and the OTT platform Hoichoi on 10 May, traces Dutt’s own journey with his mentor Sen during the making of the maestro’s 1981 film. Chaalchitra has fared better than Palan. Then there is Srijit Mukherji’s Padatik on Sen’s life and times, where famous Bangladeshi actor Chanchal Chowdhury is playing Sen, which is slated for release sometime this year.
Beyond box office performance, how much of the Calcutta that Sen showed in his films exists today? The politics of the Naxalite revolution that had fired his films like Interview (1970), Calcutta ’71 (1972), and Padatik (1973) is a thing of the past for the city. The city’s name itself was officially changed to Kolkata in 2001. And the New Wave cinema movement that Sen was an indelible part of has given way to a wave of nostalgia-peddling cinema that seems to find no new stories to tell. One can still justify three films on one filmmaker, saying 2023 was after all Sen’s birth centenary year, but Sen is not the past master today’s Bengali filmmakers have gone back to. There has been Satyajit Ray and his stories, and more recently, Uttam Kumar.
Also read: Mrinal Sen’s Padatik, about dispirited Communists in 1970s Calcutta, is a tale of our times
Only Ray of hope?
Before Sen, there was Ray. Filmmaker Anik Dutta, whose Aparajito released last year and narrated the story of the struggles of Satyajit Ray during the making of his iconic film Pather Panchali (1955), told IANS that the “process of revisiting the film and Ray’s oeuvre was like his personal route to self-discovery”. Dutta’s film did well both at the box office in informing a new generation of cinema watchers about the struggles and sacrifices the maestro had to go through before the magic happened on screen.
The problem is that Bengali cinema seems unable to move beyond Ray and his stories. If Srijit Mukherji’s 2004 debut film Autograph was a retelling of Ray’s 1966 film Nayak, one of his latest obsessions is bringing Ray’s famous detective Feluda alive on OTT. Mukherji is not alone. Ray wrote a series of very successful detective books starring Feluda, two of which he turned into successful movies. After Ray, his son Sandip and a host of filmmakers have adopted Feluda for the screen. Legendary actor, the late Soumitra Chatterjee, played the original Feluda and has been etched in fans’ memories, but since then, so many actors have played Feluda that it first became a competition among Tollywood actors and then a joke when almost all leading men of the industry had played the sleuth. Just like most of them ended up playing the other famous Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi.
And why should late directors have all the fun? This year, Srijit Mukherji brought yesteryear’s superstar Uttam Kumar alive as a character in his film Oti Uttam by strategically splicing old scenes from his movies, ably aided by artificial intelligence (AI).
“Single screens are shutting down in Bengal,” film journalist-turned-publicist Indranil Roy told me. “There are only multiplexes in and around Kolkata that are thronged by the Bhadralok class, which gets its high from nostalgia. This is why there are movies on late directors and old detectives and too few new ideas. If a Bengali movie makes anything between Rs 2-3 crore, there is a big success party,” he said.
Also read: Mrinal Sen, the cinematic genius who had the courage to bring social realities on celluloid
Pushpa rises in Bengal
The other way of looking at this is that single screens are shutting in West Bengal as the audience is fed up with nostalgia-peddling of Tollywood’s filmmakers. Film critic Sharmi Adhikary says the Bengali film industry has gone too far with nostalgia-peddling. “Why cinema, even in music, art, and fashion, we cannot go beyond Tagore, Ray, Sen, and Ghatak. How long will we piggyback on old greats and celebrate nostalgia and decadence? No wonder single screens are in shambles,” she told me.
Bengal’s single screens came alive in 2021 though, when the Telugu film Pushpa: The Rise starring superstar Allu Arjun released. Pushpa smashed box office records all over India and even in Bengal. “The film collected anywhere between Rs 5 to 6 crores from West Bengal alone,” Indranil Roy said. Now, Pushpa 2 teaser has become a big hit in the state. As reports suggest that Pushpa 2will be the first Telugu film to be released in Bengali, will the audience again do the blasphemy of filling single-screen theatres to watch Allu Arjun’s trademark swagger and dance moves over Sen’s sensible cinema?
Deep Halder is an author and journalist. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO SPELL TELUGU? AND HOW DOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS GET PAST THE EDITORS.
VERY DISAPPOINTING