When Swatilekha Sengupta’s single take left spectators teary-eyed

In a pivotal scene in Belaseshe (2015) – translated as ‘at day’s finish/autumn of life’, a narrative about an ageing couple, the place the person seeks separation from his spouse of just about 50 years – Soumitra Chatterjee’s Biswanath tells spouse Swatilekha Sengupta‘s Aarti, how he feels there’s no love left of their marriage, it’s solely a mere behavior. Aarti stops knitting to calmly launch right into a discourse on obhyash (behavior) and bhalobasha (love). She says how she makes use of the identical moist towel that he leaves behind post-shower, eats his leftover fish pores and skin, cleans up after he leaves the washroom – as a result of in all these she finds him, and, for her, love manifests in these habits. “It was a single-take shot, and after it was over, the entire unit was in tears,” says Shiboprosad Mukherjee, one half of the movie’s director duo Shiboprosad-Nandita.
“In my years of directing, I’ve seen that whenever the unit personally connects with a performance, you know there’s something (powerful) in your cinema,” he says, including that the sequel Belashuru (the day’s starting) – which takes off from the place the primary left – is prepared for launch however “Soumitra-Swatilekha’s last film together” deserves a big-screen launch, post-pandemic, that’s a promise he made to the 2 veteran actors and shall wait even when it takes three years.
Actor Rituparna Sengupta, who performs one of many daughters, speaks of an uncanny reel-real connection as Soumitra and Swatilekha handed away “back to back” (him in November final yr and her now), that what Arati advised Biswanath within the movie – “I want you to leave the world before I do, because if I left earlier, you won’t be able to bear the pain” – turned a actuality.
Director Shiboprosad Mukherjee with Swatilekha Sengupta on the movie set. (Photo: Shiboprosad-Nandita)
Working together with her late onscreen mother and father was a “career milestone” for Sengupta, she says from Singapore. “I was always in awe of her. She was an epitome of everything, not just theatre. Our colossal loss, emotionally and professionally, can never be overcome. Naatok er jini samrajni chhilen, cinema joto tuku peyechhen onar kaachhe, cinema has prospered (Cinema prospered from whatever little it got from the empress of theatre),” says Sengupta.
Swatilekha’s cinematic high-point stays her first movie Ghare Baire (1984), as Satyajit Ray’s heroine Bimala, after which a small function in Roland Joffé’s City of Joy (1992). She’d mentioned, in lots of interviews, that after Ray’s movie launched, Indian critics unleashed vitriol on the “unlikely” heroine who “didn’t look or live the part”, she sank into melancholy, although Ray guarded his “most intelligent actress” and advised her to focus solely on worldwide critiques, which, after the Cannes premiere, appreciated the “pretty, surprisingly willful Bimala”. “The actor who returned to the camera after three decades was more confident and raring to go,” says Mukherjee, 47.

When he and co-director Nandita Roy solid Swatilekha’s daughter Sohini of their debut movie Icche (2011), Mukherjee says, he sensed a damage in his former instructor for not contemplating her, too, for a job. He skilled with Swatilekha at Nandikar theatre group, helmed by her, Sohini, and husband Rudraprasad Sengupta. As a “whole-timer”, he learnt “physical acting, vocal acting… that was a very crucial period in my life. Swati-di would read out and voice-act plays (Shakespearean plays Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and King Lear, among others), tell us why they were written, analyse each character. My inclination towards world theatre developed there. She’d also shield me from Rudrababu’s wrath,” says Mukherjee, who’d first heard Swatilekha in and as Antigone within the Sophoclean tragedy (wherein Rudrapasad essayed King Creon), which was initially a radio play and later launched in cassette and LP data. “That play really haunts me, I often listen to it and Swati-di’s extraordinary vocal-acting still rings in my ears,” he says, including that in Class XII, after watching (the 1988 play) Shesh Sakshatkaar, he needed to develop into an actor with Nandikar.
Actor Rituparna Sengupta with director Shiboprosad Mukherjee on the movie set. (Photo: Shiboprosad-Nandita)
The tables turned in 2014, when pupil (Mukherjee) solid instructor (Swatilekha) for Belaseshe. She was barely “apprehensive about facing the camera after 30 years (opposite her former co-star Soumitra, signed the same day as her), being out-of-practice”, and the viewers anticipated “Soumitra-Sabitri (Chatterjee), Soumitra-Lily (Chakraborty), or Soumitra-Madhabi (Mukherjee) pairing, but Swati-di was our first choice. She left everybody far behind in acting, in the film; after every scene, during the shoot, Soumitra-babu would say, Swati phaatiye dicche, ki oshamanyo abhinoy korche (Swati is performing exceptionally),” says Mukherjee, including that accolades poured in from Amitabh Bachchan, Mahesh Bhatt, Subhash Ghai and the Malayalam and Marathi movie trade.
“A disciplined actor, she would stick to the script and listen intently,” he says. “’Shibu, amay shobai bolche, tumi keno bolchona, shot ta bhalo hoyeni? (everybody’s praising, why aren’t you, didn’t I do a good job?),’ she’d say,” he recollects. Within the primary week of taking pictures, the crew turned like a household. “(Onscreen son) Shankar Chakraborty still carries Soumitra-Swatilekha’s photo in his wallet,” says Mukherjee. Sengupta recollects a practice journey, from the movie’s shoot, when each Soumitra and Swatilekha sang, recited poetry, relayed tales, and in Santiniketan, after the day’s shoot, the crew would sit to play antakshari. “In Belashuru all of us danced as well and she’d speak excitedly about how she danced in their (Nandikar’s) recent production Naachni,” she says. Swatilekha “was so unassuming, always preferring to stay low-key” and “had a very unusual voice”, her dialogue-delivery was “effortless”, and her face “expressionless”, as her function demanded… “there was so much to learn from her,” says the actor.