KOLKATA: Nudity was presentable on screen so long as it was consistent with the plot of the film and was portrayed aesthetically enough to make sure it didn’t degenerate into pornography. There was nothing shameful about the female form which should stop it from being filmed, said actor Nandana Sen, who found herself at the centre of a controversy for her “bold’ scenes in the film “Rang Rasiya” screened to an overflowing audience at Nandan on Tuesday. Sen said she received plenty of hate mail and threat calls from people who hadn’t watched the film.
“The response of the Kolkata audience has washed away all the bad memories, though. It has reaffirmed our belief that there was nothing wrong with what has been shown. In fact, it was highly appreciated here which is extremely gratifying,” she said while addressing the media at Nandan along with director Ketan Mehta on Wednesday. She went on to add that posing nude for the film had never bothered her. “I knew that Ketan was going to do it in a very cienematic way and that the scenes would be integral to the story. I didn’t find them obscene at all for they were not trying to commodify the woman in any way,” said Sen who plays Raja Ravi Varma’s muse Sugandha in the film.
Mehta felt there was “no shame attached to the human body”. “We shouldn’t be hesitant to use nudity if the film demands. Every director should have the creatiove freedom to choose what is good for the film,” Mehta said. The Indian audience, Mehta believed, was ready to appreciate aesthetic nudity. “I was almost moved to tears to see the audience response in Kolkata. My film has been appreciated the world over, but Kolkata was very special,” he said. The motivation behind making the film came from the attacks on MF Hussain, he said. “Like Hussain, Ravi Varma, too, had been condemned and attacked a hundred years ago. Towards the beggining of this century we saw a resurgence of intolerance, a backlash from reactionary forces.
Rang Rasiya is my creative response to that,” explained Mehta. Made in 2008, the film could be released in February, 2012. Sen, on the other hand, said she had to work hard to prepare for the role. “I had two huge paintings of him in my house in Mumbai. So, inadverdently I had probably been staring at the character I was to play since much before the film was conceived. But I still had to pick up a devadasi’s body language. I am not a born enchantress like the character I play. Neither do I have the graceful body language she has. So, I had to go back to Varma’s works and study how her women would pose, tilt their hips, flutter their eyelashes and invite with every gesture. I actually put on seven kilos for the role and it took me quite a while to get used to life with Sugandha, after we had finished shooting,” said Sen. Earlier, speaking at a seminar on “Bollywood and beyond”, Mehta said there was much more to indian films than just Hindi cinema. “With the advent of digitalisation and other technological innovations, I foresee a major resurgance of regional cinema. This will promote local cultures, allow them to grow and lead to a greater interaction between them. Having said that, Bollywood has evolved its own language of cinema. It has embraced various cinematic idioms and portrayed human expressions in its own, unique way.
The name Bollywood is actually an insult and alludes that it just churns out copies of Hollywood,” added Mehta. Apeaking on the emrgence of regional films, Sen said it was heartening that various kinds of films were being made in Bengali. “I, for instance, have acted in a film like Autograph which qualifies as good cinema, off the commercial track. In Mumbai, too, various genres are being experimented with which was unimaginable even 10 years ago,” she said.
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