Subhash K Jha, in a new edition of his his feature series This Day That Year revisits Shashilal Nair’s Ek Chhotisi Love Story which released in 2002. Also in an exclusive with this writer, Aditya Seal revisits the experience of making Ek Chhotisi Love Story.
It’s astonishing what wrong media projection can do to the rightest of films. To have a film of such nuanced sensitivities turned into a semi-pornographic circu is one of the great modern tragedies of Indian cinema. But then, we have to learn to live with the shrieking degradation of art by those who have taken upon themselves the onus of improving public morality.
Ironically, Shashilal Nair’s best film to date was targeted as a sleazy peep-a-boo tribute to perversity when in fact it’s a hauntingly assembled jigsaw bringing together fragmented pieces of young and jaded hearts as they come into conflict with the exigencies of the loin.
The film opens with painstaking graphicness as a homage to the adolescent heart’s palpitating passions. We see the 14-year old Aditya Seal, alone in a Mumbai flat with his old grandma (Saroj Bhargava) psychologically and physically trailing the voluptuous decadent woman in the apartment in the opposite block.
Nair’s newly recruited cameraman Muraleedharan shoots the boy’s inner and outer world with simultaneous subtlety. Deliberately, Nair dwells on every detail of the boy’s platonic voyeurism –the way he bites into a sandwich at the exact moment when she does the same in her home, or the way his eyes follow her with adoring eyes…Forget Raj Kapoor’s depiction of an adolescent crush in Mera Naam Joker. This film captures the wispy tenderness of the boy’s wandering heart in existential closeups.
Aditya Seal, a first-timer on screen, bring an astonishing delicacy to his complex role. His is the best, most assured screen debut since Kareena Kapoor and Vivek Oberoi. Thanks to the effulgent camera- work we can see every beat of Aditya’s heart on his face. Of course a lot of Seal’s splendid emotive powers come from the fact that he plays his own age. Therefore accompanying emotions of sexual and emotional awakening come naturally to him.
To our amazement (and I’m sure the naysayers who’ve been gunning for the film without knowing what it’s about) Nair goes far beyond the theme of pubescent crush to explore the relationship between sex and love and between love and infatuation.
Two crucial sequences between the decadent “there’s-nothing-like-love-just-a –two-minute-pressure –in-the-loins” woman and the smitten adoring worshipping boy have been extraordinarily well conceived and executed. When the boy Aditya, after being bashed up by his object of adoration’s boyfriend (Ranvir Shourie, looking mighty uncomfortable hitting the sack each time Manisha Koirala opens her door) meets her in her apartment’s corridor she bluntly asks him, “What do you want? Do you want to touch me… go out with me?” This woman means business. Alas, the boy means love.
That sequence and the “climax” when she reduces the boy-hero’s great passion to a “two-minute-pressure” chart out the woman’s character with lingering lucidity. The film begins as an exploration of the boy’s sexual-emotional awakening, but eventually becomes the story of the woman’s painful consciousness of a love beyond the loins.
Manisha portrays the decadent cynical Bombay girl with a certain rainbowy flair. But her avoir dupois prevents her from getting to the ‘bottom’ of the conflict—in more ways than one. It’s hard to accept her as young Aditya’s Venus-reincarnated. But then at his age and in that impressionable and fragile state of mind, who needs a femme fatale to trigger off a chain of subconscious awakenings in the boy? In fact in his original concept director Nair wanted Aditya to be infatuated with a maidservant. Thank God for small mercies. Or going by Manisha’s size, not-so-small mercies.
Far from being a voyeuristic voyage into the heart, mind and loins of a teenager, Ek Chhotisi Prem Kahani is in reality, a film that espouses “pure” love–whatever that might be. The boy’s unconditional adoration for the raunchy woman in the flat opposite, is so spiritually idealized to seem almost seem naïve. He doesn’t want sex. He wants love. At his age that might appear incongruous. But Nair makes the distinction between love and sex convincing.
As Aditya’s shrewd grandmother rightly points out, Manisha’s character isn’t the woman to give him love. We the viewers are led gently by our hands into a realm of wispy emotions weaving in and out of the thoughtful narrative like gentle waves splashing against a sandy stretch of land .
What we like best are the sandy stretches of silences. Never before in a Hindi film have we “seen” so much noiselessness. Nair fills the soundtrack with silences. As the boy looks through his telescope at the woman he adores, we curiously follow his coy voyeurism and his amusing withdrawal from the ‘react’-race when she gets intimate with her timid-looking boyfriend.
The silences, beautifully and selectively punctuated by Arvind’s background score, add a penetrating poignancy to the film’s ricocheting rhythms of love, sex , cynicism and innocence.
The camera often chooses to follow the course of the boy’s jumpy telescope. This device furnishes the narrative with a refreshing candour and a captivating afterglow. The film has been shot in and around actual locations such as a chirpy music shop , a brightly lit hallway, a table for two at a restaurant and a driveway in an apartment block where Manisha sees the sensitive boy being driven away after he attempts suicide (though at that time she doesn’t know what she’s seeing).
The last shot of Manisha looking through the telescope, her haunted eyes searching for the boy whom she has hurt beyond repair, stays with us after the film.
Ek Chhotisi Love Story is a slow often languorous study of adolescent awakening. But it isn’t sleazy. The supposedly offensive nude scenes are so innocuous as to evoke laughter rather than titillation. In the controversial love scene Ranvir Shourie seems so apologetic about the simulated lovemaking that the lady ‘s legs(obviously not Manisha’s since they’re half the size) become the most expressive component on the screen.
What a tragic media-induced misconstruction of a film that doesn’t only have its heart in the right but also its legs firmly crossed.
Aditya Seal who was all of 14 when he played the sexually curious lead in Shashilal Nair’s Ek Chhotisi Love Story, revisits the experience in this exclusive interview with Subhash K Jha. “It’s so funny that I remember majority of the shooting days, but they only lasted for sixteen days. I even remember the person who was in charge of the costume. His name was Morris. I remember people who were on the set. I remember who the ADs were. But there are two very distinct memories. One of them was when I, there was one sequence where I had cut my finger and I was on bed and Manisha Koiralaji’s hand was supposed to come and, you know, sort of touch my hand. And the lady who played my grandmother, Saroj Bhargava ma’am, she stops her hand. When Manisha ji realized it’s her last scene, she asked for 10-15 minutes to go and do up her nails because that was her character. So for those 10-15 minutes, I still lay on the bed and the light above me, it switched off and I didn’t even realize, but I slept. 15 minutes later, when Manisha ma’am came, the lights came on and the first thing that I saw was Manisha ma’am against the light. And with no makeup, nothing at all, just her hair tied in one single pony at the back. And just imagine seeing that at 14, I literally thought that this is an angel because she looked stunning, stunning. And me the 14-year old woke up to that. It’s a very distinct memory in my head.
“The second one is the one with Saroj Bhargava ma’am, who played my grandmother. There was this one sequence where she requests me not to go, not to leave her and go, like my father had done to her and my brother had left her. And she starts, she started tearing up while in the scene, while she was speaking. Fortunately, the camera was on her, not on me, because I started tearing up. And when the shot got okay, there was a bed right next and I literally laid on the bed and I was weeping. And my director, Shashilal Sir, he ran from his room where he was watching the scene, which must have been at least 150 meters away. He ran, he sprinted all the way just to give Saroj ma’am the biggest hug.”
Talking about getting the role and then his filming experience he said, “I went for an audition to Hiranandani, that is where I had auditioned. And in the evening, my father gets a call saying that I’m selected and we go and meet Shashilal sir in his office, which was in Bandra. And I ask him the question, so when do we start? And he says, tomorrow, 9 a.m. on set. So the place that I had auditioned was literally their set. And there was no time for question and answer to know what the story was. And honestly, there was no need to also, because I was just getting a chance to work in a film opposite Manisha ji and also getting a chance to work in a film period where it’s literally two characters, a boy and a girl. And I didn’t even bother asking .I didn’t even bother getting to know what we were shooting. Shashilal sir would come on set. I would be on set. He would tell me, what am I supposed to do. I’m looking through a telescope and he would keep telling me, what am I feeling? What am I emoting? And that’s how we did the entire shoot. And even when they were shooting the other bits, which I wasn’t involved in, I was made to be in my room. And I had my exams coming up, so I was made to study. I was in the ninth, I’m guessing. And yeah, that’s how the entire shoot happened.’
Adding, “I would still choose to start with a film like this. It’s been spoken about even 23 years later. There was recently a video that was pulled up of one of my interviews from the film, and people still do remember it. So, yeah, it’s been a great start. I have absolutely no complaints. It was a very small crew, very small set with limited budget, with limited time, so everybody had to be professional. And at that age, I didn’t understand the meaning of it. Obviously, I didn’t understand the way a film set used to work. So just got the hang, just got the understanding of how people work and, you know, how you need to work in crunch situations. So that geared me up for the rest of what I do. And one experience that I had, which taught me something very weird about life was… here I’m going back to talking about the pretty lady who played my grandmother, Saroj Bhargav ma’am. So she was an elderly lady and she was unwell at the time we were shooting. There was a nurse on set with her. There was an oxygen tank and she somehow powered through all of it. It was years ago that Shashilal sir had seen her in a play and had promised her that he would cast her in one of his films. And it so happened that Saroj ma’am got to play the role of my grandmother in this. And she finished the shoot. She finished the dubbing, but she could not watch the film because she passed away before it released. So what I understood of that was that it must have been in her that, you know what, somebody has promised me that I will be in a film. It must have been the desire of an actor to be a part of a film. And she literally just waited for that. And when she did get what she wanted, she was at peace and she left us.”
