Bye-bye bollywood

protagonist repeatedly driving his motorcycle at a slow pace on empty, neon-splashed Mumbai roads?

He reveals, “I would go for long drives before the pandemic and introspect... the scene was inspired by that and it was also a bit of cinematic liberty. It’s a subjective interpretation of my character’s mind.” He adds a tantalising coda: “I will leave you to decode it.”

So I ask the director to decode his life. How did the three-year-old child who watched Main e Pyar Kiya (1989) 74 times on VHS metamorphose into an avant- garde filmmaker far removed from fantasy-laced cinema?

Tamhane begins by walking me through the early years of his life. “I turned 33 recently. I was born in a Worli chawl in a typical Maharashtrian house. My parents, Sandhya and Deepak Tamhane, my younger brother, Vikrant, and I were a happy family despite financially difficult times. My uncle, Shekhar Tamhane, was a respected playwright. My mom would encourage us to see plays and take us to Dinanath Mangeshkar Natyagriha and Shivaji Natya Mandir.”

But due to the dwindling family income, watching plays became a luxury. So, Tamhane says, “TV became my go-to place for entertainment.”

The seeds of Tamhane’s transition to a cineaste fascinated by experimental world cinema first germinated in Mithibai College, where he was an English literature student. He preens, “I never attended class – I was busy with theatre.” And the drama enthusiast acted in theatre competitions.

To earn money, he joined Balaji Telefims as a writer for the TV show Kya Hoga Nimmo Ka, and spent chunks of that cash buying DVDS or renting them at Rs 100 each. At the recommendation of his mentor, Nishikant Kamat, he watched City of God (2002), and thus began his initiation in world cinema.

“It just changed something in me,” he shares. “The film’s treatment, editing, casting... everything was awesome. It opened a whole new world in my head; I didn’t even know there were films being made in Brazil. Subsequently, I discovered brilliant films made in Russia, France, Denmark. As a youngster, I wouldn’t watch Hollywood films, as I couldn’t understand the accent. But now, I watched the works of Haneke, Wong Kar-wai and, later, caught up with cinema masters like Kurosawa as well as our own classics in theatre and film. I watched the

“WATCHING CINEMATIC WORKS OF ART WAS A TRANSFORMATIONAL EXPERIENCE. I DECIDED I LOVED CINEMA IN A DIFFERENT WAY AND MAYBE I WANT TO MAKE FILMS.” —CHAITANYA TAMHANE