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| Sunday, 9 November 2003 |
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Exploring the dark and erotic
by Jayanthi Liyanage It needed the firm hand of friend Pooja Bhatt to pull him away from a nine-year stint of film editing.
Once that was done, with his first cinematic direction, "Jism", which was a dark, moody 'film noir', he says he broke the moralistic mould of the conventional and commercial Indian cinema. "In my protagonist, Bipasha Basu, I tried to create a New World Indian woman who is not afraid of her sensuality and sexuality," says the 32-year-old, new wave film maker Amit Saxena, a somewhat diminutive dynamo of contained vibrancy. Saxena is now in Sri Lanka with his crew, making his second movie which is set locally, with locations cutting across Colombo, Kandy, Ella and Nuwara Eliya. Equipment and manpower comes from his Sri Lankan collaborator, Film Location Services. "I am carrying only hair and make up. Making a film is a great common denominator as it makes great synergy working with locals who make up half of my crew of 50," says an exuberant Saxena. He also raves about the very metropolitan look of Colombo which lured his film here. "I am going to tell everybody back home that it is a cosmopolitan place and flourishing right now."
The new film, a romantic comedy, has as its protagonists, three emerging stars on the Bollywood skyline: Vidya Mallavde (Sheena), Shiny Ahuja (Ashiwn), and rock star Karan Oberoi (Nakul), lead singer of the popular Indian band, "the Band of Boys." Shweta Kunnur, a seasoned Tamil-Telegu actress, plays a fourth. The better-known, long-haired, Indian actor Makran Deshpande comes in a cameo of the film. "If you have seen the aesthetics and sensibilities of Jism, those are what my new film will cater to," says Saxena. According to Saxena, within ten minutes of the start of the film, the narrator gets an opportunity to play God in Sheena's life. "This is an aspirational tale of Sheena, a ramp model hopeful of becoming a fashion designer. She comes to Colombo for a presentation, having spent the whole night tailoring her new fashion, but loses her assignment. She walks dejectedly out of the building when her life splits in two. In one life, she realises her dream. In the other, she reaches the same path, but must go through the entire motions of life when finally destiny meets her." The special moment when one life ends and the other is resumed is hidden jealously under Saxena's sleeve and he has aptly titled the film, "Take Two." "I have taken the film a little forward from this point as people in my country completely live by that format," he explains. "Whatever is destined for you will come true, irrespective of the path you tread on. Everybody in this subcontinent operates by that parameter. Even in our dreams and prayers, we are thinking of another life to come. It is something unique to this region and I think that's what binds us together as one people." Saxena's move to break the norm in Take Two has been influenced by his fondness for Polish film maker, Krzystztof Kieslowski and the "what-if" formula of his 1981 thriller, "Blind Chance". Its protagonist is a man whose life splits into three in a railway station. The erotic sensibilities of Jism had its origins in the 1944 Billy Wilder classic noir called "Double Indemnity" which held out a model for all noir films of 1970s and 1980s. The Bhatt factor in his creativity too, is significant. Besides the impact Mahesh Bhatt's "Arth" and "Saaranash" made on him during the eighties cinematic trend of breaking the norm of hero/heroine, Mahesh's daughter Pooja was the co-producer of Jism, amplifying its "audacity of thought and spirit" and speaking on behalf of "abandon" which she stated to be "an emotion we have been brainwashed to suppress." Vidya's debut film "Inteha" (the Limit) directed by Vikram Bhatt was to be released in India during Diwali. "People now understand that there is another genre of films other than the commercial classic romantic comedy genre which the Indian cinema has been dealing with at large," Saxena says. "We have reached the saturation point of the big budget films. In conventional commercial films, the heroine treads on well-demarcated lines of morality, will not question anything and always follow a man. I have never lived with women like that and my mother worked all her life. It will be foxy on my part to present a heroine as being not adventurous enough to experiment with what the variety of life holds and live by her own rules. I do not see venturing out as a lack of morality but see that parameteres set by other people have to be broken. They are being broken now in India." For Jism, criticism, as he says, came from male viewers who preferred women to be viewed as objects. "Sheena is not 'I'll take on the whole world' woman," ventures Vidya. "She is vibrant, kind-hearted and vulnerable but still fighting an emerges through it all." "We need to move a little bit away from fantasy and see more of modern reality", adds Ahuja, who has just completed the film "Million Such Desires" in Hindi, English, Urdu and Panjabi. Sri Lankan locations have had high praise from Saxena who sees the terrain here as "Very Asian and so much unexposed. The Indian locations have been shown to death and there is no novelty there. The Sri Lankan look could be something anywhere in this sub continent." While Film Location Services speaks of three more foreign film projects in the pipeline, Take Two, produced by Vikram Singh, with a musical score by Haris Jayraj, is expected to be released next February. |
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