In Ghosh’s original and beautiful re-working of the novel, set now in Bengal in about 1925, Raima Sen and her real-life sister Riya Sen are cast as two unrelated women, one urban and progressive (Raima as Hemnalini), and the other rural and totally traditional (Riya as Kamla), whose lives are fatefully tied to the same man (Jisshu Sangupta as the young law student Ramesh). Ramesh is in love with Hemnalini. Under family pressure he marries a woman he has never met, Susheela, but ends up bringing home a third woman, Kamla, by mistake.

About 100 years ago, Tagore’s fine idea was to adopt two kinds of plot situations often used by Shakespeare, the shipwreck (and its consequences), and the “mistaken identity” tale, and use them to tell a totally Indian story, anchored in a familiar Indian situation, the arranged marriage: in a society where two strangers might be assigned to a lifetime together, what would it mean, and what could happen, if a man accidentally brings home the wrong bride from his wedding?

The cinematically lush Noukadoubi has the pleasures and the power of an old-fashioned tale, as well as the challenging themes and non-filmi acting style of a 21st century international film. A love-match disrupted, a shipwreck, a case of mistaken identity, people lost and then found, and amazing coincidences causing paths to cross and cross and cross again: in distinction from most movies made in the west, some of the best Indian commercial cinema has always been the fairy tale-like story, where somewhat super-normal things happen to somewhat normal people. If there aren’t so many of these at the moment in Hindi cinema, it’s a joy to find that kind of story told here, laced with the nuance and originality for which Ghosh is so deservedly highly regarded.

Shakespeare’s mistaken identity stories tend to be comic, with people mixed up about love and then happily getting to know themselves just enough better, and just in time, to end up with the truly right person. Noukadubi, however, has more to do with the potential for tragedy where actual identity is disregarded for the sake of tradition, and people are not able to live their lives as who they really are.

Noukadubi opens beautifully and seductively, in a place we’d love to stay in, the book-filled and serenely comfortable Calcutta home where Hemnalini, a poised and lovely young woman, arranges flowers and sings a song (from Tagore) of her dreams of a sweet married life soon to come. With the appearance of Ramesh, Ghosh completes the picture of a modern love relationship, a man and woman who are connected on every level, intellectual equals who tease each other about books they’ve both read and are also truly in love.

When Ramesh’s father abruptly calls him back to his village, we are suddenly in a world that has changed very little in the last thousand years.

From the elegant drawing-rooms where individuals, male and female, meet and connect, with perhaps someone in a suit playing “The Foggy Foggy Dew” on the piano in the background, and a father’s heart’s desire is his own daughter’s happiness, Ramesh has stepped back to the restrictive feudal world of the unfeeling patriarch, the suffering widow, the life ruled by an astrologer’s chart. Devdas-like, Ramesh agrees to marry – immediately — the village girl to whom he’s been promised. Not only has he lost forever the true companion he has chosen, his father lets him know that the woman he has chosen for his son to live with for the rest of his life cannot even read.

Ramesh is in a state of acute distress following his unwanted wedding. Then his riverboat back to Calcutta, carrying a large number of couples, is shipwrecked in a storm. Ramesh survives, though many do not. When he awakens on a riverbank, surrounded by bodies of those who have drowned, he assumes that the young woman who happens to be at his side, still swathed in her bridal wrappings, is Susheela, the stranger to whom he has just gotten married. And because communication between the two of them is so constricted, it is quite some time into married life that he realizes it is Kamla, and not Susheela, he has brought home.

Once Ramesh has ascertained that his real bride is dead, Noukadubi provides the pleasure of twists and turns and mystery about who will find out what, and when. Will Hemnalini absorb her sensible father’s advice, and find someone else to love? Can the now not-really-married Ramesh, encumbered with a woman who still thinks she’s his wife, straighten out the situation created by his own father’s advice? Will Ramesh break the news to Kamla, and if he does, can she survive it? What does it mean, in Indian society, to be erroneously married? Or to be married at all? What about Kamla’s real husband, then? Did he drown, or might he turn up?

Raima, in a performance that tells us there is always intelligence at work, is perfectly cast as a woman who would most naturally be a whole person and equal to her husband in marriage, a daughter raised in a progressive home. In a wonderful moment after she knows what has happened, her loving and congenial father (Dhritiman Chatterjee), tells her something like, “There is no reason to feel your life is over. This is just one year of your life.” And the performance of Riya as Kamla, a meek but intelligent traditional girl, matches Raima’s in power. Hemnalini sets out to survive her disappointment and get on with building a life; Kamla (who does not know she has the wrong husband) is determined to adjust and succeed as a wife in the marriage in which fate has placed her, even if it’s not what she expected and includes, incomprehensibly, chaste behavior on the part of the man who knows she is not really his wife.

The handsome Jisshu’s portrayal of Ramesh, contained, slightly indecisive but emotionally present, lets you ache for the life he’s just lost, and also share the frustration of both Hemnalini and Kamla as long as neither one has what she longs for with him.

The coincidences in the movie as this all unrolls are left for the viewer to encounter and enjoy, as is the appearance of Prosenjit in a fine performance in a pivotal role in the second half of the film.

Ghosh’s decision to set the film in the 1920s pays off in lushness and variation of costume, as well as the recognizable presence of the western and modern, including a progressive view of women, in urban Calcutta.

Art direction by Indraneel Ghosh over a dazzling range of interiors and exteriors, lavish and modest, in Calcutta, a village, and Kashi (Varanasi), among other locales, and costumes by Saborni Das, make this one of the richest Indian period pieces I can recall, with a lot of credit too to the cinematography of Soumik Haldar. Gulzar’s translations of Tagore’s poems for song lyrics are praised by Hindi-speakers, and the songs themselves are sublime, even to a viewer who relies on subtitles in English.

Life-wrecking events and mistakes, caused in part by fate, in part by the ways that women are failed by tradition — what can be repaired, and what has to be endured? Can happiness take root again in the aftermath? Of Ghosh’s recent work, Noukadubi/Kashmakash perhaps has the most accessible popular appeal – with no sacrifice in mental pleasure or sophistication, Noukadubi is essentially a plot-driven story about a set of well-drawn characters that keeps the viewer engaged to the end.

If the wonderful Sen sisters, as two highly different women, make a stronger emotional impression, even though Jisshu’s stoic Ramesh may have more time on the screen, that is probably not a mistake.

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“I never thought dancing and singing actors got awards!!” – Bollywood star Rishi Kapoor looked truly happy, bounding onto the stage at the Asia Society, on New York’s Park Avenue, to accept his award for Best Actor at the closing ceremony of the New York Indian Film Festival on Sunday, May 8th. For the eleven years of its existence, the Indo-American Arts Council’s annual film festival has brought New York’s culturally sophisticated South Asian audience and artists, both US-based and India-based, together for an exceptional four-day weekend of screenings, conversations, panel discussions, and parties, as well as providing an extremely rare opportunity for the larger New York community to see movies and meet filmmakers from the widest range of South Asian industries.

This year’s enthusiastic capacity closing-night audience enjoyed not only the awards ceremony but also a tribute to India’s Nobel Prize honoree Rabindranath Tagore in honor of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The closing event featured a premier screening of Noukadubi [Shipwreck], Rituparno Ghosh’s stunning Bengali film based on a Tagore novel – itself inspired by the stories of shipwrecks and mixed-up identities in some of Shakespeare’s plays. The movie was introduced and discussed by Richard Allen, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, and Bengali actress and director Aparna Sen, who acted in Gungat, a very different Bengali film adaptation of the same story, many years ago, and shared some reflections on Noukadubi as a profound meditation on the question of what a marriage really is.

Then it was on to the awards ceremony and amping up the festivity considerably, Rishi’s Best Actor award was presented to him by Neetu Singh, who starred with her husband for the first time in thirty years in the Disney-backed independent Hindi family comedy Do Dooni Chaar, in its United States premiere screening and the festival’s opening film,.

The ebullient mood of the Kapoors was definitely matched by their spirited reception from an especially glamorous-looking, mostly-South-Asian audience, with women guests taking the opportunity to bring out luxe saris and up-to-date stylish churidar-kameez on a lovely spring night to create an evening of India-in-Manhattan at the awards event and the celebration and reception to follow.

An award from the NYIFF carries real prestige, and the festival awards ceremony generates real suspense. The New York Indian Film Festival is New York’s oldest Indian Film Festival, and only a small number of films submitted win a screening. As Indo-American Arts Council Executive Director Aroon Shivdasani explained last week, festival prize-winners are selected by a jury of thirteen film professionals, and their votes are audited by KPMG LLP, the American audit, tax, and advisory services firm. No one knows who is going to win, not even the festival staff or jury, until the moment when envelopes are opened by the presenters onstage.

The films discovered and chosen for screening by Festival Director Aseem Chhabra, the well-known South Asian entertainment journalist, and his selection committee, are all by and/or about South Asians, this year including filmmakers from the US, Britain, Bangladesh, and Pakistan as well as Mumbai, Bengal, and other film industries of India. 150 films were submitted for consideration this year for the four-day program, which has changed its name and shifted to a new place on the city’s cultural calendar, taking place for the first time this year in the spring instead of the fall.

Awards presented at this year’s festival were as follows:

Best Feature Film: Sthaniya Sambaad, (Bengali), directed by Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas, who was there to accept the award from Salman Rushdie, a long-time festival community member and supporter.

Best Director: Aparna Sen, for Iti Mrinalini (Bengali). Mira Nair, another member of New York’s Indian creative community who has been present at the festival since its first days presented the award to the director. (An exciting moment for the audience, one great and talented Indian woman director presenting an honor to another.)

Best Actor: Rishi Kapoor for Do Dooni Chaar, (Hindi) enthusiastically presented by Neetu Singh and received that way with some cheers as well.

Best Actress: Konkana Sen Sharma for Iti Mrinalini (Bengali). The film was the festival’s Centerpiece selection. Presented by Rishi Kapoor and accepted on behalf of Konkana by her mother, Aparna Sen, who said that after Konkana’s new little baby, this award would be the next thing to make Konkana happiest.

Best Screenplay: Mohan Raghavan for T.D. Dasan Std, VI B (Malayalam). This award was presented by Aparna Sen

Best Documentary: Bhopali (English) – Max Carlson.

Best Short Film: Just That Sort of a Day (English) – Abhay Kumar. Madhur Jaffrey, who has been a strong and beautiful presence in the Festival since its first year presented this award.

Have a look at some exclusive shots of the event!

Aroon Shivdasani, Indo-American Arts Council Executive Director, and Mira Nair, announcing the award to Aparna Sen for Best Director

Aparna Sen, winner of the festival award for Best Director for Iti Mrinalini

Aparna Sen receives her award for Best Director from Mira Nair (Photo credit: Virginia Kelley)

Neetu SIngh has just presented the festival award to Rishi Kapoor for Best Actor (Photo credit: Virginia Kelley)

Salman Rushdie presents the award for Best Feature Film to Moinak Biswas for Sthaniya Sambaad

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh at the Asia Society, Park Avenue, New York City. Rishi is carrying his award for Best Actor for Do Dooni Chaar.

Photo credit: MichaelToolan.com

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From Mani Ratnams’s big-budget Tamil-language take on Ram and Sita in Raavanan, to Ajay Naidu’s English-language Ashes, a gritty story of mental illness, greed, drugs, and family, MIAAC’s amazingly well-curated programming includes a range of features, documentaries, and short films, by or about Indians, that were made throughout India and the rest of the world. This festival has been the first place a lot of us, both eastern- and western-born, first got to know the overwhelming richness of the whole of Indian cinema in its endless variety of stories, styles, and languages. If you just walk into a film that’s about to start at MIAAC and take a seat, it is very likely that your own world will be enlarged by the time you leave.

Aroon Shivdasani, Indo-American Arts Council Executive Director, and L.Somi Roy, Film Festival Director, have long enjoyed the respect and support of New York’s culturally vibrant Indian community. Salman Rushdie, Madhur Jaffrey, Mira Nair, and other well-known Indian New Yorkers are expected at various events. Post-film discussions with directors and other guests have been organized by Richard Allen, faculty chair of the New York University Department of Cinema Studies.

This year’s lineup includes films in at least nine languages, all screened with subtitles, including one offering in Hebrew-Hindi-English (Rafting to Bombay, about a colony of Jews in Mumbai who arrived as refugees during World War II), as well the now-expected great array of galas, screenings, discussions, and industry panels — open to everyone — with directors, stars, and other guests from India and elsewhere, and free (and glamorous) after-parties for ticket-holders.

In addition, there will be a sidebar festival, a wonderful opportunity to see some films of the heartbreakingly wonderful Smita Patil on a big screen with subtitles: “Bhumika: the Roles of Smita Patil,” produced in partnership with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, at the Walter Reade Theater. (Full information at http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/patil.html : note this side festival continues on after MIAAC, through November 18).

Opening, Closing, Centerpiece

MIAAC program highlights include: Opening Night – Shor, directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, three stories set during the Ganesha festival of Mumbai, with Sendhil Ramamurthy and Tushar Kapoor; the Festival Centerpiece, Memories in March, directed by Sanjoy Nag and written by and starring Rituparno Ghosh ( in attendance along with Raima Sen and Deepti Naval): when she travels to Kolkota to collect the belongings of a son who has died, a mother finds out that he had a life she knew nothing about. (In addition to the evening’s after-party, there will be a special pre-party for Memories on Thursday, whose hosts include the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association.)

The closing night feature is Cooking With Stella, written by Deepa Mehta in collaboration with her brother Dilip, who directed, about what happens inside the kitchen and out when a Canadian couple takes on a diplomatic assignment, and a kitchen staff, in Delhi.

A small sample of a rich program

A few other notable program entries include two children’s movies – a great opportunity, these almost don’t exist in India — The White Elephant, with Tannishta Chatterjee (Aijaz Khan, director) and an animated feature version of The Ramayana, produced by Ketan Mehta and written and directed by Chetan Desai. In addition, Mani Ratnam will be present at a special showing of Raavanan. New York’s own Samrat Chakrabarti, now appearing on national television in the series In Treatment, is in The Waiting City (Claire Mitchell, director), along with Radha Mitchell, about an Australian couple who’ve traveled to Kolkota to adopt a child.

And in another category just now being explored by a new generation of filmmakers – India has not produced documentary features until very recently – the award-winning Leaving Home, about Indian Ocean, “the baap of all Indian rock bands” [The Hindu], performing together for more than 15 years, here seen in intimate rehearsal, in small-venue performance, and in all-stops-out concert mode. The poignancy of the film was sadly deepened by the recent death of a founding band member, Asheem Chakravarty, who appears in it.

For full information,http://www.iaac.us/MIAAC2010/index.htm.

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In Joseph Mathew-Varghese’s fresh and sophisticated Bombay Summer, the urban worlds of three young people expand when a middle-class couple make friends with Madan, an artist who’s recently come to Mumbai from his village. From the movie’s first scene, where the everyday comings-and-goings of anonymous people in a little street stand are mildly disrupted by a muffled off screen crash, the movie’s skillfully sustained mood of immediacy and openness is gently shadowed by a sense of possible danger.

Geeta meets Madan when he comes to her editorial office to show her his work. When she hires him to design a project, her writer boyfriend, Jaidev, joins them in rambles to search out shooting locations, with Madan leading the way. As their friendship develops Madan takes them into some – but not all — of the Mumbai he knows: abandoned mills; a Rajasthani concert in a hidden location, the disused movie theater where he has his studio and a few film-poster-painters are still doing some work.

The movie, all beautifully shot on location in Mumbai, sometimes “guerilla-style” (Mathew-Varghese’s previous films are documentaries), also takes us into each character’s own environment – the well-furnished bachelor flat of Jaidev, where he and Geeta can be intimate and alone; Geeta’s middle-class home with her family, who would like to prevent her romance with Jaidev; and the tenement chawl that Madan lives in, in the society of other marginal young men like himself — as well as a glimpse of a much uglier side of Madan’s Mumbai that he does not share at first with Jaidev and Geeta: up to now the Mumbai underworld has been his chief source of income.

In an excellent ensemble performance all three characters have equal weight: Tannishtha Chatterjee as Geeta is both independent and impulsive, the one who is impelled to reach out and cross boundaries; Samrat Chakrabarti as Jaidev is cautious and a thinker but passionate as well, the kind of guy who sometimes seems stiff but then really touching and young, as when he and Madan connect over a record collection. And Jatin Goswami’s physically magnetic Madan is played with dignity, and with an outward sweetness and reserve that overlies growing internal distress. His situation gathers emotional urgency as the story goes on and first we, and then his new friends, realize more fully what kinds of things he is doing in order to survive in the city. Geeta and Jaidev respond very differently, and we wonder where fate will take all of them.

The soundtrack by the French musician Mathias Duplessy and Mir Mukhtiyar Ali from Rajasthan provides a brilliant score for the worlds-mixing themes of the movie.

Bombay Summer has won Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Film awards at a premier Indian film festival in the United States, the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in New York.

It is being released in the United States on Friday, October 8, starting at Big Cinemas in Manhattan, and continuing on into the fall at other locations including Edison, NJ, San Jose, CA, Norwalk, CA, and Chicago, IL.

Trailer:

To find out more check out www.bombaysummer.com

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Directors and stars, from the Hindi film world, Bollywood and elsewhere, Kolkata, Pakistan, and many other places on the international cinema map, will be present to talk about their movies at virtually every screening of the 25 or more films chosen for the festival.

The festival includes a large number of US and world premieres, but maybe because it is more focused on content and “life” than on commerce, the atmosphere of the festival – and the many satellite parties, panel discussions, and delightful fashion shows that go with it – has in the past had a warmly inclusive feel, with time and space for audience members to engage with each other, festival staff, and the filmmakers and actors who are festival guests. Myna Mukherjee, Engendered I-View’s executive and programming director, has a gift for creating festival communities with a culture of decency and authenticity.

Celebrity Guests

Onscreen celebrity guests who will be there this year, as of today, include Zeenat Aman, Helen, Juhi Chawla, Konkona Sen Sharma (she will also present a short film she directed), Rahul Bose, Rituparno Ghosh (as an actor and director), Arshad Warsi, Arjun Mathur, Aparna Sen (as actor and director), Sanjay Suri, Purab Kohli, and Raima Sen.

Directors of most of the films will be present in person. They include: Vishal Bharadwaj, Dibakar Bannerjee, Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh, and Onir Anirban as well as Saeed Mirza., M.S. Sathyu, and the makers of almost every feature, documentary, and short film.

Program Highlights

A few highlights from a schedule of 25+ films include: for opening night, Saturday, September 18, a reception and red carpet event with most of the festival celebrity guests, and a North American premiere screening of I Am, from Onir (My Brother Nikhil): four stories about challenging modern-day situations — homosexuality, blackmail (Rahul Bose/Arjun Mathur), pregnancy via sperm donor (Nandita Das/Kurab Kohli), adult survival of child abuse (Sanjay Suri), and return to a lost home in Kashmir (Juhi Chawla/Manisha Koirala).

On the afternoon of September 18 — a brunch party, films, and panel discussion on the theme “Contraband Pakistan – Debunking the Stereotypes”. A program highlight is Bhutto, a rich, informative, and highly discussable documentary about the family, historical context, and life of Benazir Bhutto, the Harvard-educated woman Prime Minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in 2007. Also – (Women of )Without Shepherds, about the lives of four different women living in Pakistan today, excerpted from a highly-praised documentary in progress, Without Shepherds.

Festival Centerpiece – Just Another Love Story, starring Rituparno Ghosh (director of Chokher Bali, Raincoat): different generations, different identities: an openly gay film director and his bi-sexual partner are making a film in Kolkata about Chapal Bhaduri, a male folk theater performer/jatra who has lived his life portraying women (Chapal is an actual living person in Bengal, now in his 70s).. Another talked-about movie is Sanjay Sharma’s Dunno Y . . . Ya Jaane Kyun – buzz in the press about the sexy male romantic poster couple, and extra excitement for Bollywood fans about the promised appearances, on screen and in person, of Zeenat Aman and Helen.

The closing film is Mirch, directed by Vinay Shukla, a look at the subject of women and freedom through four stories about betrayal, two starring Konkona Sen Sharma and with a cast that includes Boman Irani, Raima Sen (attending), and other Bollywood favorites.

And more . . .

In addition to several programs of documentaries and short films,

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