M. Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (2014), has been a contemporary landmark in Tamil cinema. With its rooted milieu and universal thematic appeal, it has been drawing worthy comparison with Satyajit Ray’s timeless Pather Panchali (1955), since its release last year. It has now been remade in Marathi and is scheduled to be out in the theatres on July 22.
The title, Half Ticket , is a common term used across India for the discounted travel offered to children. It also harks back to Kishore Kumar’s 1962 comic classic where he tries to pass himself off as a kid to avail of the railway concession. With two young, innocent boys, both poor slum dwellers, at its centre, the title fits the remake to a T.
The rights were acquired by producer Nanu Jalsinghani in September last year. The shooting, with filmmaker Samit Kakkad at the helm, commenced in November and was completed in three schedules of 11 days each. The makers screen-tested nearly 450 children before zeroing in on Vinayak Potdar and Shubham More for the lead roles.
Half Ticket , like some other recent Marathi films — Elizabeth Ekadashi and Killa, for instance, makes an attempt at traversing life and seeing things through children’s eyes. Kakkad’s first film Aayna Ka Baayna (Delinquent Dancers), released in 2012, was also centred on children.
Its story is credited to Manikandan and music to G.V. Prakash Kumar, who scored for the original. All this for a good reason. “We wanted to retain the soul of the original even as we adapted the script to suit the milieu of Mumbai,” says Kakkad. The lyrics in Marathi have been written by Kshitij Patwardhan.
So how different then is Half Ticket from Kaaka Muttai ? According to Kakkad the screenplay reflects Mumbai’s unique identity. “Mumbai’s slums are a microcosm of the cosmopolitan nature of the city. We have people from different States speaking many languages: Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, different Hindi dialects. This shows even in the life of those people in our movie.”
No wonder then for Kakkad, Mumbai (home to Dharavi, the largest slum in India and one of the largest in the world) provided the perfect setting for the remake. With close to 60 per cent of its population living in slums and shanties, Maximum City is the effective example of India’s tryst with globalisation and the concomitant uneven distribution of the riches.
However, as numerous parallel tales of achievement show, it is also home to the dreams and desires of the underprivileged, quite like the two brothers in the film. Kakkad himself has his roots in the slums of Kaula Bandar and Darukhana. “That was the area where my grandfather was born. Matunga, where I live, is very close to Dharavi. I have had the best of relations with children from both Kaula Bandar and Dharavi since my childhood. The film made me connect with my own subaltern identity.”
Kakkad feels that if there is one definitive film that has shown Mumbai slum life in its authenticity, it is Mira Nair’s Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay (1988). But there haven’t been many similar attempts in Marathi.
With the release date round the corner Kakkad now wishes to have a screening of his film in Chennai, “with the cast and crew of both the movies watching Kaaka Muttai ’s Marathi version unfold on screen.”
Not an entirely impossible desire.
