Chalchitra Ekhon: Mrinal Sen tribute
Updated On: 05 May, 2024 09:07 AM IST | Mumbai | Meenakshi Shedde
This is a coming of age film, but not typically of an adolescent
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Illustration/Uday Mohite
Anjan Dutt’s Chalchitra Ekhon (Kaleidoscope Now, Bengali with English subtitles) is a moving film that drops on SVF’s streamer Hoichoi on May 10. This partly autobiographical, fictionalised film is a tribute by popular actor, composer, singer and filmmaker Anjan Dutt to his mentor, the late distinguished filmmaker Mrinal Sen (1923-2018). It references Mrinal Sen’s Chaalchitra (Kaleidoscope, 1981), in which the senior director gave a young Anjan Dutt, 26, his first break as an actor, that deeply influenced him and his career, and led to a lifelong friendship. The 2023 film is a living connection to our contemporary film history, made in Sen’s centenary year (2023-2024), and one of three feature film tributes to Sen by popular filmmakers, along with Srijit Mukherji’s Padatik and Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak are Bengal’s holy Trinity, and Ray’s towering presence has often overshadowed the work of Sen and Ghatak; all the more creditable that Sen is being tributed thus.
Chalchitra Ekhon was shown at the Kolkata and Dhaka International Film Festivals (where Anjan Dutt won the Best Actor Award), and it also reflects the tragic state of indie cinema that it’s getting a theatrical release only in select Kolkata theatres, and is also out on OTT, the same day. Anjan Dutt, who has directed about 30 films and series, including Bow Barracks and The Bong Connection, and acted in about 55 films, is also a popular composer-singer, of course. He had won Best Debutant Actor for Chaalchitra at the Venice Film Festival in 1981, but the producer went bankrupt right then, so the film was never theatrically released as such, but shown at Nandan during the centenary in 2023 and on Doordarshan.
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