Actress-turned-director Aparna Sen makes her first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane

Jennifer Kapoor with Debashree Roy Dhritiman Chatterjee in 36 Chowringhee Lane and (inset) producer Shashi Kapoor: Aiming high on a low budgetLights. Camera. Action. In a ramshackle old-age home at Tollygunj, in the outskirts of Calcutta. Aparna Sen, the leggy, doe-eyed, "cerebral" him actress, crisply orders the camera crew. Her camera crew, that is.In a dramatic reversal of roles, the 35-year-old actress-turned-director is now making her first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, under the banner of actor-turned-producer Shashi Kapoor's Film-Valas. Sen, who made her acting debut 20 years ago in Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya, has a certain intellectual reputation which places her a cut above the rest of the women in the vapid, perpetually ailing Bengali film industry.For many cine-goers, she is Bengal's only star after Suchitra Sen, the only woman to play the modern woman. And, over the years, the image has been fed on her family background (Chidananda Dasgupta, the film pundit, is her father), the elegant nuances of sexuality in her acting, her non-conformist life-style, her broken marriage, and what have you. But nobody ever envisaged her as a director. And more so after Manju Dey, a screen siren of the '50s, tried out her hand as Bengal's first woman director, and flopped.So, when the news filtered out of the Kapoor establishment last year that Sen indeed had been signed as its second director, after the celebrated Shyam Benegal (Junoon, and Kalyug, the film in the making), it raised eyebrows rather than expectation.Good Plot: However, Kapoor can discern a good story much the way a model-photographer can spot a good face. He jumped in excitement when Sen told him the outline of her plot, all written by her, in Calcutta.Director Sen at the sets: An eye for detailA week later, Kapoor phoned her from Bombay, asking her how soon she could get the script ready. In fact, it was already ready. She only had to catch the next plane to Bombay, to sign the papers.36 Chowringhee Lane is an English film, a rarity in India. It is also shot entirely on outdoor location. The 500 feet or so of Bengali dialogue aims only at lending authenticity of milieu to the story which focuses on an evanescent minority - the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta. At another level, it is a tragic and passionate parable of human neglect which was conceived, as Sen recalls, "in an hour of extreme boredom".The story revolves round Jennifer, Shashi Kapoor's British wife, who plays a greying Anglo-Indian school-marm in one of those numerous "English-medium" schools. She teaches Shakespeare, and does a pretty bad job at that. At 36 Chowringhee Lane, in her dark tenement-house apartment, she shares her loneliness with Banquo's ghost and Mark Antony's oratory.It is a bleak, eventless life only partially enlivened by the letters from sunny, fast-paced Australia where her niece, Rosemary, like most others of the left-overs from the Raj, has migrated. The rest of her chore is a regular, almost ritualistic visit to an old age home where her ailing brother lives. Equally ritualistic is her once-a-year visit to a tomb, in one corner of a wind-swept burial ground, where her lover was laid to rest 25 years ago.What ruffles the sleepy tenor is a chance meeting with an old student (played by Debashree Roy) and her fiance, played by urbane and handsome Dhritiman Chatterjee (the hero of Ray's Pratidwandi). The couple is tired of kissing in taxi-cabs, and needs a private room to get closer.Sen directing Jennifer: Taut, racy scriptTheir prurient intention goes unnoticed by the teacher who finds in her new-found friendship with them a new meaning for her life. The boy has literary pretentions and impresses her with his dilettantism.The girl has an aura of romantic innocence through which Jennifer relives her past. So, it is no great sacrifice for her to hand over the room-key to them when she goes out for work. The twosome have to continue their literary discussions, or so she thinks in her pristine simplicity.Deception: It is a tizzy return to youth. The mail from Australia lies unattended. The visit to the ailing brother is forgotten. But the little game of deception draws a full circle as the couple gets married. The "literary sessions'" end, and the couple does not visit 36 Chowringhee Lane any more.Then the monsoon rolls in over the seedy tenement block. Meanwhile a new principal takes charge of her school who thinks, and rightly so, that the children deserve a better Shakespeare teacher.A scene from the film: Tale of human neglectJennifer is shunted off to the drudgery of teaching grammar. She accepts her lot and brings back home her Shakespeare notes. As the rain patters, the hope that keeps her together is that someday the two will come back again.But they don't. Instead the boy puts up false excuses of official tours and business engagements over the phone. On Christmas Eve, she makes a cake for them as a surprise gift. She goes to their palatial house, uninvited, after being told that they were out of town.There, rubbing the frost off the glass pane with her old, wizened fingers, she sees the couple bubbling at the centre of a glittering party. The little world of illusion shatters in front of her, and she crawls back to her darkened room mumbling the last lines of Lear almost by force of habit.Aiming High: Jennifer herself is ecstatic about the film, and so is her husband. "It's a taut, racy script, the kind that one hardly expects from a person writing the first script," says Banshi Chandra Gupta, the famed art director working for her. "She has a fantastic precision, a rare eye for details", says Amitabha Chatterjee, Sen's assistant who had once made her act in one of his own films.Unlike Junoon and Kalyug, Shashi Kapoor's production number three is a low-budget film with no star-trappings thrown into it. Obviously, with a small investment, he is aiming high. And the English dialogues may prove useful in winning an international audience.But isn't the language a barrier at home? "It can't be helped really", says Sen, pointing out in the charming Calcuttaesque amalgam of English and Bengali that making it otherwise would have meant doing "something like Julie". The latter is a trite formula film on an Anglo-Indian girl who speaks, and maybe thinks in Hindi.Sen is slogging over the film like a workaholic, personally supervising the work of each department, leaving nothing to chance. "She comes home at 11 p.m., then sits up most of the night working out shot divisions for the next day's shooting," says Mukul Sharma, her second husband, who is a poet. He might not have been taking a poetic licence. The transition from the front of the camera to its back is a little hop that requires great effort.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 26, 2013 12:03 IST--- ENDS ---

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Actress-turned-director Aparna Sen makes her first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane

In a dramatic reversal of roles, Aparna Sen is now making her first film, 36 Chowringhee Lane, under the banner of actor-turned-producer Shashi Kapoor's Film-Valas.

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