All that remains is pure cinema
Yahi Sach Hai was the short story by Mannu Bhandari on which director Basu Chatterji based his new film. After the shooting, Chatterji and producer Suresh Jindal faced rejections from multiple distributors, with one of the reasons being that all three lead actors in the film—Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha and Dinesh Thakur—were either debutants or with insignificant experience in film acting. After a one-and-half-year wait, Rajnigandha was released in September 1974.
Time and again filmmakers have taken big leaps of faith in casting totally new faces, with All We Imagine As Light (2024) being the latest example. Why? Maybe, in the first place, the filmmaker couldn’t rope in a producer with pockets deep enough to accommodate saleable stars. But then it works out fine because, shorn of box-office magnets, these ventures totally become the directors’ films.
No getting swayed by demands like that in the song Zindagi kaisi hai paheli from Anand (1971), which the hero Rajesh Khanna insisted be picturised on him as against the original idea of it playing in the background. Or whims with make-up like Urmila Matondkar’s reluctance to dispense with her contact lenses even while playing a jail inmate convicted of drug and gunrunning charges in Ek Hasina Thi (2001).
No ‘hero images’ to contend with either. In one of the scenes in AWIAL, Kani Kusruti is shown squatting in the bushes passing urine while one of Divya Prabha’s bare breasts is exposed in another scene. No commercially established heroine would have agreed to these. But with new or lesser-known actors, Payal Kapadia found the freedom to tell the story exactly the way she had imagined it.
Low-budget ventures bind the unit together with that ‘garage-startup’ type camaraderie that is the dream environment for the startup’s CEO (director, in this case). The cast and crew become like family, huddled into cramped accommodations, laughing the discomfort away. With commercial expectations of the end output being low anyway, the film’s critical appraisal and nominations in film festivals become the unit’s Big Win and every member’s focus sharpens to doing the very best they can. A stardust-free cast also means that shooting can be wrapped up in a month without having to play Rubik’s cube with dates.
Films with fresh actors are also important for the industry to be able to show cinema as pure cinema. With no anticipation of fillers like a grinding item number, the audience is left to savour core cinematic aspects like camera angles, colour mix, screenplay and other technicalities. In AWIAL, Prabha, Anu and Parvaty are the smaller-than-life representations of millions of other migrants in Mumbai.
In the opening sequence, Kapadia’s strides around Mumbai by dusk with her camera may well have bumped into a different group of migrants altogether and their stories may have touched us just as sensitively. The end-of-day grimy sweat on Prabha’s tired face, Anu’s excited fidgeting ahead of her rendezvous with her boyfriend, the rains, the traffic, the nightly view of the highrises as seen through the low-income dwellings—dreams and hallucinations converge to inject one more shot of hope. And that hope acts as the wind in the sails.
Balaji Vittal
Film commentator and author
Posts on X: @vittalbalaji