A tete-a-tete with filmmaker Soukarya Ghosal

Soukarya Ghosal was noticed with his first film Pendulum (Bengali, 2014) which was about a surrealist painter. He made a film for film for television in 2015 (shot like a film as it happens in this Zee Bangla Originals series of films) named Load Shedding which I liked for the most part. As he is ready to release his next feature film Rainbow Jelly (Bengali) on 25th May 2018, he talks to Kolkata Curry neck deep in pre-release work. The most curious bit of Rainbow Jelly is that its protagonist is played by Mahabrata Basu who is a special child.

Kolkata Curry: You Facebook profile says you are an animator. What prompted you to become a filmmaker?

Soukarya: I am not an animator. Actually I learnt the process of animation while doing the post-production of Rainbow Jelly. I was a graphic designer and illustrator working with a leading Bengali daily, doing cartoons and writing a few features and page 3 articles. Later on when I came to filmmaking with Pendulum I chose painting to be the subject. The protagonist is a painter who takes his audience into his painting and the space of the painting becomes the real space when one goes into his painting. So, the influence of art was there from my first film since I came from that background. While doing Rainbow Jelly this influence was also there on Ghnoton’s wall and while writing the script I thought that the imagination of Ghnoton would be his own drawings.

KC: Rainbow Jelly is a food fantasy. That's a fresh concept. What was the germ of the idea? Why did you choose to spin a yarn through different flavours of food?

S: Rainbow Jelly is known as India’s first food fantasy film. The concept of food fantasy is that you weave a fantasy story around the basic structure of food. My film is about the seven tastes of food- Sweet, salty, sour, spicy, astringent, pungent and bitter. What I’ve tried to say is that we change in character based on the tastes (of food we eat), like chocolate triggers happy hormones. But it’s much beyond that. While writing the story I was referring to Ayurveda where I found an interesting concept - Don’t make medicine your food. Make food your medicine. With properly recommended, different kinds of food you can heal up your body and mind. Any ancient philosophy believes in development of both body and mind. Ayurveda traces it with much more details like chemical combinations of food but I didn't want to go into such depth as my film is a fun film with children all around and a mysterious character. I just wanted to tell a story where something is happening...something funny is happening with the structure of taste and the change in characters. We also included seven colours with seven tastes and seven is actually a magical number. If you see the film you’ll find that there are seven days, seven colours, seven tastes and seven notes of music. We have merged a food fantasy with all of that. It's a fresh concept which came to me while I was learning cooking. I love to eat and I love to cook. While cooking I’ve found that with your state of mind the taste of the food actually changes. I’ve also found that if you are happy the taste of food is different from the food you prepare when you are not happy. So from there the germ of the idea came and I thought that what if the world can be changed with food.

KC: Tell us how you found your protagonist Ghnoton in Mahabrata Basu who is a special child. What were your ways of getting him follow your instructions on the set?

S: I found Mahabrata with the reference of Moushumidi (Moushumi Bhowmik) who has sung a song in my film. She had come to know that I was looking for Ghnoton. She goes to a school of 14-15 students and teaches English there. I had briefed her on Ghnoton and she said that she knew someone there who she found close to Ghnoton. So she asked the boy to come to my house. Mahabrata came with his father. Initially I didn't think he fit in because he had numb expressions like all special children. But after four-five minutes when he smiled, it was so radiant that I was convinced that he was my Ghnoton. I immediately locked him. After selecting Mahabrata, his mother Gargi-di called me and asked how much of dialogue there was in my script for him. I said that there was just one scene without him and the film had quite an amount of dialogue. She told me to kindly leave Mahabrata therefore because till then in his school there was no concept of memorizing or writing exams. The concept was something alien to him. But I said that I wanted him. While I write a script I do sketches of characters, in black & white and colour. I told her that the features (of Ghnoton) were very close to Mahabrata. Gargidi then said, “OK, fine, give me a few days.” After three days she sent him to my house and asked me to try out the first few scenes with him. He came to my house, ready with the first five-six scenes. When he was stuck with the dialogue and couldn't recall the lines, I would give him the script, but he couldn't make out anything looking at it. When I asked him, I found out that he actually memorized the script because his mother had constantly narrated it to him like Ramayana or Mahabharata after his return from school and that's how he memorized it like shruti of Veda. It was an interesting finding for me that he mugged up the entire script by listening to it. When he came to the floor he was so ready that  he remembered his own lines and others’ lines too. It didn't happen with the other actors who weren't ‘special’ like him. There were directorial assistants to give them the cue (when they couldn't remember the lines) but with Mahabrata my assistants had little to do. With the dialogue he even remembered every narration like the camera was panning or the camera was in the trolley. So Mahabrata was an exceptional case to deal with. I found my protagonist Ghnoton in his smile initially, but later on his numb expressions were very painful for me to change. Then I devised this ‘Smiley method’. I drew 67 smileys on his script- Happy, sad, angry, worried, amazed, irritated etc. I used to make him practise the smileys fast, changing expressions. (While taking shots) I used call out the smiley names and his reaction would change with the command. Mahabrata was an obedient child on the set and above everything he had a tremendous sense of rigour which is a gifted thing. This rigour helps him do certain things that a normal child can not. Actually he is very conscious of his own state and he is constantly challenging the odds he is facing as he always wants to win. And by that he is constantly overcoming himself and developing himself. That makes him easy to deal with as when he used to be stuck with something, most of the times he came up with more rigour to solve the problem.

#RainbowJelly #BanglaCinema #BengaliCinema #BengaliCinema2018 #TollyDiaries

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