The film that Sushant Singh Rajput will be most remembered by, Sonechiriya, which turned six on March 1, is the most anguished plea against injustice and oppression since Bimal Roy’s Sujata. The deep silences in Abhishek Chaubey’s clenched narrative reminded me of Roy’s film about a Harijan girl (Nutan) looking for an identity.
We don’t have Harijans anymore as targets of exploitation. Director Abhishek Chaubey uses eerie silences in the stunning Chambal landscape to punctuate a sense of excruciating oppression. Besides Sushant and Ranvir Shorey, I came away with two heroes in Sonechiriya. The little brutalized girl from whom the film gets its title, whose devastated eyes still secrete a smile after all she has gone through. Raw, gritty, and compelling, Sonechiriya conveys a clandestine narrative style that never impinges on the violent disarray of the characters’ brutal, unpredictable lives. It is as Indian in spirit as cinema can get, and yet, as international, it is a film on oppression like Spike Lee’s Black Klansman.
Some of our actors are so inured in brilliance we’re persuaded to notice their power. Sushant Singh was one of them. In Sonechiriya he just blended into the bleeding colours of brilliancy. By singling out Sushant’s brilliance, I don’t mean to undermine the other performers, most of whom, specially Ranvir Shorey and Manoj Bajpayee, are so skillfully effective that they seem to have been born in the hungering shadows of their ever-renewable excellence.
But then, the point here is not the brilliance. It is how the rites of accomplished filmmaking are applied to a solid narration that are on your mark and all set to go even before we are fully able to grasp the wide spectrum of characters on the run. Dammit, they are all fugitives, even the vicious vendetta-seeking cop played with an iron ironic meanness by Ashutosh Rana, who is so bloodthirsty his venom fills the Chambal valley with echoes of exasperating nemesis.
In this world of apocalyptic despair, Sushant Singh Rajput’s Lakhna decides to rid his guilty conscience of its inexorable burden by helping a woman to protect and heal a brutally raped girl-child. I wish the relationship between Lakhna and the ravaged girl was given more space to grow.
But wishes cannot be horses. Not in a dacoit drama without a single horse in sight. In fact, there is a joke in the film about how Hindi films show dacoits galloping away when, in fact, there are no horses in the Chambal Valley. There are no heroes, either. Only victims posing manfully with guns that kill, not just human beings.
Sushant was rightly proud of Sonechiriya. He said, “I’d like Sonechiriya to be appreciated for all the hard work that our director Abhishek Choubey has put in…In fact, all of us actors and technicians slogged in the Chambal heat. It feels nice when the reviews appreciate one’s efforts. I’ve never sought fame or fortune. Never been enamoured of the 100-crore club,” said Sushant without the arrogant vanity of the so-called avant garde actors who revel in their failure to connect with audiences.
Shooting for his outlaw’s role in Sonechiriya, Sushant spends days and weeks preparing himself, staying unwashed, unfed, unattended. “My character wanted to surrender to the law. I surrendered to the law of self-discipline that I’ve made for my job. What I found in common between my characters in Kedarnath and Sonechiriya was that core of humanity. Mujhe woh pakadna ttha (I had to catch that). Baqi success or failure is not something I understand.”
I asked director Abhishek Choubey where he placed Sonechiriya in his oeuvre. “ Sonechiriya is very close to my heart. I was successful in putting my original vision about the film on to the screen. My screenwriter Sudip Sharma and I wanted to create a lean, thrilling dacoit epic, but the film had a warm, thoughtful, beating heart. A film that stays with you long after you’ve watched it. I had always hoped that it will outlive the vagaries of the box office. And I’m happy to say that it has. I look back at my association with Sushant Singh Rajput with nothing but love. He was a lovely man, a star presence we sorely miss today. Both Sudip and I consider Bandit Queen as one of the finest films ever. And we embraced its influence on us.”
