Ritesh Batra can distinctly recall the bad Hindi films of the 80s and the 90s centred on the ‘taming the shrew’ theme. “There used to be tons of them and I used to watch everything... There would be a poor guy, usually a mechanic, and a rich girl whose dad would be into some vague business,” he says. He wanted to take this well-worn formula and turn it real and character-based. The result? His fourth film, Photograph , which premières at Sundance Film Festival in January 2019.
“A struggling street photographer, pressured to marry by his grandmother, convinces a shy stranger to pose as his fiancée. The pair develops a connection that transforms them in ways that they could not expect,” reads the film’s Sundance synopsis.
The film is not quite the love story it might appear to be, Batra says. “It is about two lives that intersect and go together some way.” He is on a long distance call from New York, and he is fixing his morning cuppa while we talk.
Prime openings
Each of Batra’s films so far has started its journey at a prestigious international film festival. Point it out, and he says nonchalantly: “That’s kind of how it goes.” The Lunchbox premièred in International Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2013. The Sense of an Ending had its world première at Palm Springs in January 2017, and Our Souls at Night was at Venice the same year. Photograph will be unveiled in the coveted premières section of Sundance that features “some of the most highly anticipated narrative films of the coming year.” Films that have premièred in the category in recent years include The Big Sick , Call Me by Your Name , Boyhood and Mudbound .
Batra calls Sundance one of the best places to launch a film. “It’s the home for independent films and a great platform for a film to start travelling around the world,” he says.
On top of that is the personal association he has had with it. He attended the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab in 2009 with his project Story of Ram and won Time Warner Story Telling Fellow at Sundance Film Festival and Annenberg Fellow at Sundance Film Institute; he is also on the festival’s board of trustees.
With his last three films, Batra has built a personal genre of sorts: of intimate and intense, simple yet profound cinema of human relationships. His films have been about people struggling with alienation and loneliness, bonding with and finding solace and comfort in the company of strangers.
Our sweetest songs
Last year, speaking to The Hindu , Batra had pointed out that it is not so much sadness as the bittersweet element that he likes to explore — “to find a sort of co-existence and centring of opposite emotions in the same piece or movie; scenes that can be both sad and funny.” He says it’s difficult to describe something one has made, but he thinks his films are more about longing than loneliness. “Loneliness is sad but longing can be both sad and funny.”
Heart in Bandra
The Bandra boy is currently based in New York, which he thinks is the best place for him to live and work. Not only did Photograph get him reunited with the The Lunchbox crew, the quintessentially Mumbai film has also been a homecoming of sorts — over the 36 days of filming he got to shoot in Gateway, Behrampada, Andheri, Manish Market. “It’s the first production of my own company (Poetic License Motion Pictures) and it made sense to do it in Mumbai. It is still home for me,” he says. He also circles back to Indian actors with the film — Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Vijay Raaz, Jim Sarbh, Geetanjali Kulkarni and Akash Sinha. Siddiqui was always on board, he says, not just because they worked together on The Lunchbox but because he was right for the part; he too comes from a UP village like the character he plays on screen.
Batra auditioned a lot of actors for the girl’s part being played by Malhotra. “We needed someone reserved, in their own shell, and Sanya is naturally like that,” he says.
After The Lunchbox , his films have been adaptations (Julian Barnes and Kent Haruf) and about directing someone else’s script (Nick Payne, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber). Photograph marks a return to his own writing. He confesses having missed it. “There is a sense of a greater control. I would like to keep doing it for a while, doing my own writing and rewriting,” he says.
Be it adaptations or original scripts, the ultimate aim is to make “alternate films that appeal to a mainstream audience.” Also, it’s important for him to make films in India, to tell stories of where he is from: “My real desire and goal is to tell Indian stories to the world.”
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
