Padmaavat’s Jim Sarbh fronts May-December romance in Bengali
Shreya Mukherjee
Filmmakers often seek inspiration from their personal life, and taking a leaf out of that book, come up with screen story. It was the special bond between National Award-winning filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta and his late grandmother that inspired him to make Jonaki.
The film, starring Jim Sarbh — who has won hearts with his performances in Neerja (2016), and Padmaavat — had its world premiere at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam (in the Netherlands). And, Aditya is happy with the response it has got. The film is the tale of an 80year-old woman who is in search of love.
“I was close to my [maternal] grandmother and would listen to her growing-up stories. She had this immense hunger for romance and she would talk about her idea of love to me in her own way,” says the filmmaker. “When she was dying, she was in a state of coma for four days and I was by her side. During that period, she would murmur indistinctly, as if she was visiting a space that exists somewhere [in her dream or time that has gone by]. The film, in a way, is about my imagination of what she could have imagined in her state of unconsciousness. It’s a complex world of nostalgia, memory and a sense of loss.”
What made him cast Jim as the young lover of the 80-yearold woman, played by senior actor Lolita Chatterjee (who acted in Talash (1969), Victoria No. 203 (1972), and Aap Ki Kasam (1974), plus several Bengali films)? The filmmaker explains that it was mainly because of “the look and requirement” of this Bengali film [with English subtitles]. He shares that they had considered Emmanuelle Riva (who was part of Michael Haneke’s Amour, 2012) but she passed away early last year.
Jonaki is Aditya’s second film. His first, Labour of Love, released in 2014. Explaining the long gap between these two films, he says that he was busy with another project. “I was working on [the film] Memories and My Mother, but that has now been delayed till the end of this year,” he says. For now, Jonaki comes first.