Who is the eternal heartthrob for Bengali women? Ask anyone between 30 and 90 and you will find there is only one name on their lips: Uttam Kumar. Even younger women, when they do catch one of his movies on TV, are bowled over by the charm of this romantic hero who ruled the Bengali silver screen from 1950 until his death at 54 in 1980 and is still remembered to this day as the greatest ever: Mahanayak.
Now Srijit Mukherji, the Kolkata-based filmmaker who is a five-time National Award winner for films such as Autograph (2010) and Chotushkone (2014), is bringing Uttam Kumar back to life with his upcoming film Oti Uttam. Not as a living character, but as a ghost – a friendly one roped in by a young man to play cupid and help him win the love of an elusive lady. Interestingly, the film has Uttam Kumar’s grandson, Gourab Chatterjee, playing a key role.
Not impressed?
Well, here is the USP. The ghost of Uttam Kumar in the film is not portrayed by a look-alike but created using the clips of the actor from his original movies.
“This is the first time ever, to the best of my knowledge, in the whole wide world, that the principal character of a film is created out of existing footage of an actor who is no more,” Mukherji told me. Imagine Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, or Guru Dutt being resurrected as the star of a whole new film today.
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Voice cloning in Oti Uttam
The animation technology has been used in Indian cinema in the past. It combines basic VFX tools such as rotoscoping and compositing. Examples are a song titled Nunugu Misalodua in SS Rajamouli’s Yamadonga (2007) and the Deewangi song in Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007).
In Hindustani (1996), the technology was used to show Kamal Haasan shaking hands with Subhas Chandra Bose. And in Hollywood, the scene where Tom Hank’s Forrest Gump in the eponymous film shakes hands with US President John F Kennedy is legendary.
However, this combined process has never been used as extensively as Mukherji has to bring Uttam Kumar alive on screen.
There is more. The screenwriter-director has used the services of a US-based AI company, Resemble.ai, to clone Uttam Kumar’s voice. He provided them with a data set of the film star’s voice and got them to generate original dialogues for Oti Uttam. The audio was damaged in the old clips or had even disintegrated due to age and poor upkeep.
Mukherji also used the cloned voice to deliver words that Uttam Kumar had never said. The cleverest line is, “Since I am coming from very far away, my image may at times appear a little unclear.”
Mukherji wrote this dialogue for the film to excuse the poor quality of visuals in several scenes where Uttam Kumar’s old clips were used. His team and he had to scour records and track down producers to procure Uttam Kumar’s films and the legal rights to use them, a process that took almost two years. Mukherji studied 87 films of the actor to identify shots and dialogues that matched his script and visual requirements. He ended up using clips from 54 of the movies.
No AI could have done this legwork. But the voice cloning and its use, Mukherji says, “at the risk of sounding immodest, is pathbreaking”.
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Threat of AI and filmmaking
The release of an AI-modified version of Lutt Putt Gaya from Dunki (2023) was a eureka moment for Mukherji. Originally sung by Arijit Singh, an Instagram content creator named Anshuman Sharma used AI to replace Singh’s voice with that of Mohammed Rafi. The video went viral to the extent that someone has now recreated the same song using Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s voice.
All this is happening at a time when Hollywood’s writers and actors had gone on strike for months against the threat posed by AI to the industry, and Bollywood, too, is waking up to it. Most famously, actor Anil Kapoor took legal measures to protect his likeness, voice, name, and image from being used by AI. The Rashmika Mandanna deepfake case also gave a fright to the Indian film industry.
On the flip side, AI can also make filmmaking cheaper, easier, faster, and more democratic. The talk of the town today is OpenAI’s Sora, the AI model that turns text into video. Yes, give Sora the right prompts, and the kind of videos it is creating are making waves. In one such video shared on social media, a dog can be seen typing on a laptop. So realistic, it is plain eerie.
“Unfortunately, my film was finished before Sora arrived. Else, who knows the ghost of Uttam Kumar could have been less ghostly,” Mukherji said.
The return of the Bengali superstar who stole hearts with films such as Saptapadi (1961), Antony Firingee (1967), Grihadaha (1967), Nayak (1966), Sanyasi Raja (1975), and Chowringhee (1968) is being greeted with bouquets from fans. And brickbats from those who feel Mukherji’s plot is gimmicky, and taking advantage of the Bengali nostalgia and love for the Mahanayak.
Amitabh Bachchan shared the trailer of the film on X when it was released on 1 March. “The first film,” he wrote, “to have a principal character made out of existing footage. A Tribute to Uttam Kumar … Oti Uttam”.
The film will be released on 22 March, and I will surely go watch the first day first show. Any self-respecting Uttam Kumar fan just has to.
What would Uttam Kumar say if he saw the film? “Oh, he would probably have said, ato jhamela’r ki dorkar chilo (why did you take so much trouble),” said Mukherji, “You should have just asked me for dates.”
The author is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)