Showing posts with label Qaushik Mukherjee interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qaushik Mukherjee interview. Show all posts
We are told learning how to f** k is wrong-Q
9:21 AM
Filmmaker Q on his upcoming release Brahman Naman, in which a high school sex comedy meets an unusual villain — caste
Benita Fernando (MID-DAY; June 19, 2016)
For Q, this might be his tamest yet. The indie filmmaker, who has, in the past, given audiences the sexually explicit Gandu (2010) and the rather macabre Ludo (2015), is gearing up for the release of his latest film, Brahman Naman, a high-school sex comedy, on July 7. Three inebriated virginal Anglophile quizzers, all Brahmins, sometime in the Bengaluru of the 1980s, go through the demands of puberty, only to find themselves constantly tussling with a repressive Indian sanskari attitude and, strangely, caste.
“We keep talking about things we cannot eat, but when it comes to cinema, our belief is that it has to be completely palatable,” Q says, predictably, after admonishing us for referring to him as Qaushiq Mukherjee. “I killed Qaushiq eight years ago,” he says, jaded with having to explain this a little too often.
In the business of making and breaking identities, Q’s latest picks up on the middle-class attitude to sex, something which has probably undergone very little change over the decades. “When it comes to sex comedies, it seems we have not understood the key issue of repression. The impact of sexual identity on social development is hardly thought about; we are told learning how to f** k is wrong! It is a physical ability as basic as eating, sleeping and drinking; good sex is as important as good water or good food,” he says.
Like Porky’s and American Pie, or like the novel The Inscrutable Americans, the mission for Naman (Shashank Arora, who starred in Titli last year), Ajay (Tanmay Dhanania) and Ramu (Chaitanya Varad) is more or less distinguished in the course of the movie — hormones are raging, there is a subconscious effort to get laid, but it seems easier to win a quiz than lose one’s virginity.
However, there is nothing stopping these high-school braniacs from ‘doing it’, not even the charming competition on the men’s playing field such as Ronnie (Sid Mallya). The only obstacles to a memorable (or forgettable) romp are themselves, as Q says.
There are opportunities aplenty, right from hotel rooms during a quiz competition in Kolkata to a night at Naman’s father’s mattress manufacturing factory Rubber On, but none that the boys want to seize. The mission hardly gets to missionary.
If anything, Brahman Naman is an anti-sex comedy. Several puns, gags and jokes in Brahman Naman fall flat, in that way that nerdy adolescent humour can outside of its circles, but it can be argued that this is the world that scriptwriter Naman Ramachandran wanted to lead us into. “Naman had been working on the script for more than two years, and it looked into the politics of caste and how men in India are brought up,” says Q. The semi-autobiographical script borrows from Ramachandran’s upbringing, the severity of classrooms and living with caste discrimination. “Even among the trio, Naman is higher up the rung, perhaps because he is fairer than Ajay,” says Q.
As caste becomes the path to abstinence, Q is sure that there will be those who shall be offended by the theme of the film, if not its content (it’s a sex comedy, what do you expect?) or title. Dismissing these concerns as “impairment” on the part of audiences “who need medical assistance for their lack of humour”, Q says he is a big fan of extreme physical cinema, such as that put forth by Japanese filmmakers since the 1970s. Lots of goofing around and slapstick apart, Q says, “Look at the way these characters carry themselves; there is a certain manner in which virgin boys walk.”
Q breaks the mold in a number of ways with this film, which is his most commercial yet. It will see a global release on Netflix, bypassing the usual travails of cinema in the country. It is also set in Bengaluru, a city often ignored by mainstream cinema. “Most of my films were set in Kolkata, so it was refreshing to depart from this and feature Bengaluru. However, much of this film is shot in Mysuru; we found Bengaluru of the 1980s there, since not much has changed. We all lived together for almost a month, with the actors imbibing the slow way of life of the 80s imbibing working on their diction [the South Indian accent to their English],” says Q.
When will we have a high-school sex comedy which talks about the female experience? Where girls want to lose their virginity to nerdy quizzers and the charming Ronnie-Mallyas of the world? “I am waiting for a story like that. A story where women talk how they were brought up in a space like India, with all its gender and racial intricacies. I want more dirty stories from and by women, the kind that will make men rethink feminine sensuality.”
Benchmarking Byomkesh Bakshy, by Qaushik Mukherjee aka Q
9:40 AM
Byomkesh Bakshi solved many a sordid crime in 1940s Calcutta. Now, says filmmaker Q, it's time to reinvent the underrated sleuth
Qaushik Mukherjee aka Q (THE TIMES OF INDIA; February 8, 2015)
As the Feluda wave slowly faded with Satyajit Ray's death, there was a quick search for other options available in Bengal. And before you could say Bakshi, Byomkesh was out of the lockers, freshly unpacked and powdered and ready for some sleuthing action. Many directors tried him out, each pushing their own agenda, but somehow they couldn't create a new benchmark — find a thrilling new way of looking at the Bengali detective, push some digital, dynamic energy into a character that has absolutely nothing in common with life today.It was Ray, not the creator, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, but the image maker, who should be credited for the proliferation of the Byomkesh Bakshi myth. Ray made Chiriakhana featuring Byomkesh with Uttam Kumar in the lead in 1967 — the ultimate Bengali imager working with the ultimate Bengali screen icon. Byomkesh was benchmarked. And, as any self respecting Bengali knows, benchmarking is everything. And Ray is the benchmark. Alright!
And for both Sharadindu and Ray, the benchmark was Conan Doyle. The Holmesian techniques thrilled them — the minute eye for detail, the uneasy relationship between the criminal and crime buster, the oddly homoerotic bonding of the detective and his assistant. But above all, it was the culture of the intelligent mind, always trying to find the crimes that were elevated, sublime, calling for the application of a brilliant mind to figure out riddles and clues. Sherlock had laid down the rules. And the post-colonial Bengali gentry were ready to play.
Ray had also begun to work on Feluda, who was to be the reigning king of Bengali sleuths. Feluda was born in 1965, just before Ray made Chiriakhana. Though he made just two Feluda films, Ray had written a number of super hit stories with the strapping young detective solving crimes around the country, juxtaposing his travels and a filmic vision with an existing classic structure. He cast Soumitra Chatterjee as the detective in the Feluda films, defining a look and feel that would be sacredly carried forward for decades. Byomkesh was practically forgotten during this time. Because Feluda was more modern, more with the times.
Because there was something else happening here. The readers had changed with the times. Calcutta wasn't the same as the 40s. Cleansed and gentrified, its language and culture sanitized by Tagorean principles, basking in the newly found middle class calm, Calcutta was no longer the den of grimy crimes that could be dramatized in fictional potboilers. Detectives were a thing of the past. So when Feluda came, he was specifically targeted at teenagers. As any follower of crime fiction knows, an overwhelming majority of crimes that need private detection happen to crimes of passion. However, the pressures of the marketplace, and the success of Feluda among kids, made sure that the most important Bengali detective never dealt with anything that had women involved. In fact, women are practically invisible in Feluda stories.
Byomkesh was older, from another time. The country wasn't free yet, and it was a cauldron of chaos. Calcutta was teeming with all sorts of people, a hothouse of dirty deeds and politics and passion. It was a metropolis, a blindingly beautiful city with its colonial architecture and tendencies. The millions of refugees post partition hadn't yet flooded the city. It was a trading centre, a political hub, with an active underground buzzing with hustlers from all over the place. Byomkesh was at home in this city, walking into the nooks and cranny, his dhoti never coming in the way between him and the criminal. He was a 'Satyanyeshi', a seeker of truth, at a time when truth meant for something finite, but the boundaries were already fading. Through his stories, that thrilled readers of all ages and segments, Byomkesh tried to make sense of the great shifts in social morality of the times.
Sharadindu was also a lover of cinema, and had also worked as a screenplay writer for Hindi films. The cinematic nuances in his work made his fiction pieces prime material for films. Filmmakers used many of his works over the years. But Byomkesh remained, in the public memory, as the first of his kind. He was an adventurer, before the times when the Bengali decided to keep to his drawing room and conduct all affairs of the world from that safe canopy. Byomkesh was fearless and manipulative, a believer in alchemy and astrology, unravelling problems with logic, and often with mysticism, creating a deadly combination of oriental and occidental methods. This was a throwback to the creator's love for alternate realities. Sharadindu was a follower of eastern mysticism and astrology.
He has often written about his fascination with the world of the dead, and often these references popped up in Byomkesh stories. With his beautiful and witty wife Satyabati, his friend and partner Ajeet, and his decidedly Bengali ways, Byomkesh was a full character, living his life as a truthseeker without any qualms.
Sharadindu had once told a friend that he has done an astrological chart for Byomkesh. According to his calculations, Byomkesh would be a successful detective alright but would never be able to make a lot of money or be a huge star. The writer was obviously being cheeky and self critical, but Byomkesh has actually always remained second best in the Bengali world of detection. Though the heat of his stories and the complexity of the world he inhabits lend themselves to soaring heights of adventure and thrill, we still haven't found the way to show this on-screen.
Qaushiq Mukherjee goes by the name Q
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