Film Impressions

PROFILE: Deepti Naval

ART FOR HEART'S SAKE

Deepti Naval unexpectedly stormed into my life earlier this year through a film called Memories In March. It’s not as if one wasn’t already an admirer of her work in Ankahee, Main Zinda Hoon, Panchvati and Mirch Masala—and her more popular films Chashme Baddoor, Katha and Saath Saath. But this performance was unsettling because of its poise and calmness in a situation that warranted a far more overt display of emotion. The restrain was disturbing and moving at once.

A middle-aged woman grieving the death of an only son in a drunken accident, Aarti travels to Kolkata to collect his remains and stumbles upon a secret that shatters her—that he was gay and in a relationship with an older colleague (Rituparno Ghosh). As she tries to make sense of this revelation and cope with her grief, she conducts herself with remarkable grace and maturity; even when she has an angry outburst, she’s impassioned without being hysterical.

PROFILE: Cinematographer Manoj Lobo

REAL CAN BE BEAUTIFUL

One of the hallmarks of Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na was the believability of its characters and situations. The Arabian Sea shot across from the Bandra reclamation was just like it is in real life, a dark moody colour. The skies weren’t a saturated blue. Poetry was made out of cement mixers (which were likened to snoring ogres). There WAS a pretty cast, but not a designer one, like in recent films like Aisha. “Of course, at the beginning some of the actors did have a problem with them not looking glamorous because they want that,” says Manoj Lobo, director of photography of the film, and of Mr Tyrewala’s next, Jhootha Hi Sahi, currently in theatres. The brief he had received from his director was to keep things real. This sat pretty with his own sensibilities, “The only thing I told Abbas at that time was that real could be beautiful without being cosmetic.”

PROFILE: Cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis

IN SEARCH OF NEW IMAGES

Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha a.k.a. LSD is India’s first major digital film. Much of the credit for its authentically tacky look goes to young Greek cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis, whose brief was to make amateurish and shaky footage look aesthetic. “When I first met Dibakar, he showed me some low-grain porn videos from YouTube. And that was all the reference material we had,” Nikos laughs. From there to designing a distinctive look for each of the three stories of LSD was an exciting journey. “The first story is the video diary of an amateur filmmaker. So we used shots from his film, which is why the footage is unframed and quite gritty. The second is a story in a supermarket seen through the store’s CCTV cameras, so we have wide, high-angle zshots. The third story has a hidden camera in someone’s vest or bag because it’s a sting journalist’s story.”