You can hear a sigh on the other end of the line when you congratulate actor-director Konkona Sen Sharma. She’s been amassing rave reviews and praise for her debut directorial venture, A Death In The Gunj .
“Suddenly everyone has such high expectations from what is essentially a very private film,” she says. Set in the late 1970s in the colonial town of McCluskieganj, the film is all about a family holiday gone wrong. It premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, had its Asian premiere at the Busan International Film Festival and will kick off the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai International Film Festival with Star next week.
How was it negotiating the journey from being an actor to becoming a director? “I hadn’t even thought that I would become an actor one day,” says Sharma. “I always shied away from it.” Direction was also something she hadn’t planned or figured out in her head. “It’s a field that people from all departments of filmmaking turn to: editors, cinematographers, writers.” So too for an actor like her.
Compelling story
The actor-director looks back at it as a result of a confluence of several things. She had just had her son. There weren’t as many interesting roles, good films were few and far between. There was more time on hand and with her Mumbai home getting renovated, Sharma was spending a couple of months in Delhi with her father, science writer-journalist Mukul Sharma. It was from him that she had first heard the story of the film as a child. “I would ask him to tell the story again,” she says. “He is a charismatic man and has a way with narrating family anecdotes. This was a particularly eerie one.” It was as though Sharma was compelled by the story. It kept developing in her head long enough to emerge as a full-fledged film script. “When I had written it, I realised that I may as well direct it.”
Sharma feels she doesn’t have the requisite distance and objectivity to comment on her own film or her craft as a maker. However, her aim as a filmmaker has been to present something that has enthralled her for long in as interesting a way on screen, for others to enjoy. What would be the one quality she would pick and highlight? The mood and atmosphere. “It’s got a specific sense of place,” she says. It has been shot on location at McCluskieganj in Jharkhand. “It’s a forgotten, remote, sleepy place which doesn’t have much of an infrastructure. It is not the most shooting-friendly place but the local people helped us a lot, they opened up their homes for us,” she says. A Death In The Gunj is the only film to have been shot there entirely. M.S. Dhoni : The Untold Story reportedly had just about a half-day’s shoot at the location.
If the story came to her through her father, then is the craft of filmmaking an inheritance from her actor-director mother Aparna Sen? Not consciously so, she feels. For Sharma, it is difficult to gauge how much she would have imbibed just by being around her mother, personally and professionally. “I had discussions with her almost every single day on the film. She was always there.”
Recreating childhood
The journey to McCluskieganj was like a recreation of her own childhood. The family used to drive down there as a family to visit her grandmother. They all helped piece together the place for her and recreate the forgotten era. “I called my parents a lot to know what it was like in 1979, since I last visited it when I was just seven or eight.” So there were three different accounts: of her father, mother and the locals. “Memory is an unreliable thing. Every person had a different take. It’s a weird mix of all versions, plus it has a fictionalised aspect.”
The film’s trope, of life-altering journeys, is a familiar one, seen in several films, including the most celebrated of them all: Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri . Sharma feels it was intrinsic to her film; there was no other way the story could have been told.
Apart from the atmosphere, the film is also getting appreciated for the performances. “It is a terrific ensemble. They are not conventional stars,” she says.
Perfect cast
Does that emerge from the fact that a good actor was at the helm of things? “The characters were clear in my head. I needed good actors for the roles. I knew I needed Ranvir Shorey to play Vikram,” she says. “I was sure of Vikrant Massey in the main role of Shutu.” And then there were some she discovered while working with them. Like veteran actor Tanuja, who plays the role of Aunty Anupama Bakshi. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to cast her. Thanks to Honey [Trehan, the producer and casting director] for suggesting her.” Jim Sarbh is another actor whose work she hadn’t seen ( Neerja hadn’t released by then) but finds him “wonderful” as Brian.
However, the most striking aspect about the film, which slipped in casually in the press release, is that it explores Shutu’s “conflicted ideas of masculinity”. “It is about his alienation and isolation and his struggle with issues of identity and belonging,” says Sharma.
According to her, gender would be a better theme or category to put the film under. The overarching patriarchy and its acceptance has been defining and moulding our society. Women bear the brunt of it and are its victims. “In the case of men, it’s not so obvious because they have much more to gain from patriarchy. But the way aggression and authority are given qualities, how are they accepted in men? What if you are not naturally like that? What if you don’t conform?”
Different journeys
For her, men could also be victims of patriarchy as much as women are perpetrators of it, sometimes consciously. Hopefully, her film will take the audience on a journey to grapple with these issues, even as it takes them on a ride to McCluskieganj.
