Ram Kamal Mukherjee and Rukmini Maitra on their film, 'Binodiini-Ekti Natir Upakhyan'
Binodini Dasi may have received very little of the honour that she truly deserved in her lifetime. Over the decades following her death, a number of films and plays explored her life, and the latest addition is filmmaker Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s Binodiini-Ekti Natir Upakhyan, starring Rukmini Maitra as the lead. We speak with Ram and Rukmini ahead of its release.
How has the transformation from Rukmini to Binodini been?
Rukmini: It was difficult and tedious, but extremely gratifying to live her life for five long years. It is an honour to celebrate a feminist icon from that day and age, who has paved the way for so many. The film, finally, releasing is a journey in itself. We often joked that the making of Binodiini could be a film of its own, given all that we went through.
Talking about the transformation process, tried to understand her psychological and emotional journey. Like Binodini, I, too, stepped into the industry at the age of 13. As a woman, I instantly related to her traumas. While we are more vocal about these issues today, they have always existed. To step into Binodini’s mindset and carry the weight of her experiences felt like a tremendous responsibility, but one I was honoured to take on.
What has been your point of view as the maker of the film?
Ram: Binodini completely revolutionised the scene, and that was the first observation that had as a director. In the story, we see Binodini as a child, Puti, whose initial step into Bengal theatre involves replacing a boy. From her first step to her last, every action she took empowered women in some way, and the beauty of her is that she has never highlighted it.
Rukmini: They say magic happens when you least expect it. She never tried to build a legacy, but it happened. She was focusing on her craft, and tried to embody that same focus while portraying her in the film.
Ram: Binodini was the first actor to play 11 characters in one play— that too, in a Girish Ghosh play— at a time when bagging a role often meant begging and pleading.
What made you choose this as the subject for your first Bengali feature film?
Ram: I have done eight Hindi films, and loved doing that. There’s no challenge in making a film confined to an apartment or centred on a relationship. I was very clear that if were to make a Bengali film, it would be my magnum opus.
Tell us about the aesthetics of the film.
Rukmini: From the beginning, we wanted to create something Bengal had never seen before. Ram and have a similar sense of aesthetics, but we had a lot of creative conflict with our costume designer, Suchismita asgupta, who has worked for a lot of periodic films before.
Ram: Suchismita came with her set of ideas and thoughts, but when she saw how it translated on screen, she thanked me for helping her break her own thought. It was so convincing that felt an even greater responsibility to deliver on that vision. And Rukmini was always an olive branch between us!
Rukmini: We have used a lot of contrasting colours that we later blended. Munni Di (Suchismita Dasgupta) said, “Are you sure if people used to wear clothes like that?” I said that we have only black-and-white pictures. Just do not use any colours that were not used back then. But by mixing and matching, we created something new, which quintessential Bengali biopics do not offer.
Ram: A lot of research was done on colours, textiles, and textures so that we wouldn’t go wrong. For instance, when Rukmini plays Chaitanya, she wears a corset. People may ask me, why? During that time, people were already watching British plays like Macbeth, where characters would have used corsets. So, when Girish Ghosh is taking her to watch these plays to educate her, she realises subtle details, like not overdoing makeup or hairstyling. So, why wouldn’t she notice that you can wear a corset to bind the chest when playing a male character?