Ritesh Batra
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Ritesh Batra
Prachi Bhuchar , The sense of beginning “India Today” 17/4/2017
It's not every day that an Indian filmmaker gets to be at the helm of a British film. But there have been a few exceptions. Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994) catapulted him to international acclaim, and four years later, the Mr India filmmaker directed a biopic on Queen Elizabeth. Nineteen years later, Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox made an impressive debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it also won an award. Four years later, he too finds himself in the international spotlight. Only he will have not one, but two releases in 2017. Batra's breakthrough year starts off with The Sense of an Ending. An adaptation of Julian Barnes's 2011 Man Booker winning novel, the film's key cast and crew is all British, save for the Mumbai-born and based Batra. Whether Batra, 37, experiences crossover success like Kapur did remains to be seen, but he has already impressed the international critics with his English-language debut, which just crossed the million-dollar mark in the US. Batra "does a subtle, nuanced job in dealing with the old folks' unearthed primal issues", wrote Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy, further recognising the filmmaker's ability to move "the action along briskly and smoothly". The New York Times noted that "the film maintains intrigue and emotional magnetism as its mystery unfolds", only losing the momentum in the last quarter. Later in the year, streaming giant Netflix will release Batra's second English feature, Our Souls at Night, which brings together Robert Redford and Jane Fonda after five decades. Also an adaptation, of Kent Haruf's novel, the film follows two lonely, widowed neighbours in Colorado.
"All stories are about relationships. As a director and writer, I would like to be someone who is trying to find perfect symphony between camera and actors and honour what we put on page," said Batra on the sets of The Sense of an Ending in Angel, London, back in 2015. "As a director, it is important to look at a script and see what it inspires in others and harness that. This enables you to push the film in one direction." Batra was shooting a flashback scene in a mid-sized commercial kitchen which had space for headphones and heavy cameras as well as half-drunk cups of strong coffee and skillets to prepare the grits and eggs. The filmmaker exhibited a nuanced way of approaching every scene-speaking to actors between takes on how he wanted the scene enacted-and a meticulous working style, taking almost five hours to shoot just one short scene. He stuck to schedule, though, wrapping the film in less than eight weeks on a modest budget of five million pounds.
THE PLOT
Batra loves the novel and ensured that his agent let the producers be aware of it. "In an adaptation, the key challenge is to decide how far you want to stray from the original," he says. "You need to find a balance and I was lucky I worked well with the writer, Nick [Payne, the British playwright], and he was comfortable with me rewriting bits while on set. We are both writers, so it was easier to communicate. In a film, you have to be flexible enough to tweak the script based on your cast and other variables. You have to keep rewriting. I believe that the script is a blueprint, not a checklist that keeps evolving." It further helped that Batra had the complete backing of author Barnes, "The big advantage I had was that Julian [Barnes] came on set and almost said go ahead and betray me. While it is nice to have the confidence of an author whose work you are adapting, it is a tough task as you have to live up to it."
Tony Webster is the narrator of The Sense of an Ending, much of which is a flashback to his debauched youth and clique of friends, one of whom is a boy called Adrian. Tony is compelled to face his past when Adrian, who dated his ex-girlfriend Veronica, leaves behind a diary. Tony's quest to recover the diary, now in Veronica's possession, forces him to revisit his flawed youth. Jim Broadbent, the Oscar-winning actor of Iris, plays the elder Tony, with Charlotte Rampling, nominated for an Oscar for 45 Years, as Veronica. The film also stars Emily Mortimer along with Michelle Dockery (remember Lady Mary Crawley in Downtown Abbey?).
INDIAN VS FOREIGN LOCATION
According to Batra, directing a film is essentially the same, wherever it might be. "Professionalism is the same everywhere and you find a way to exchange ideas and gain the trust of actors through the film," he says. "There are talented actors everywhere, so you need to find your mojo and do what works best for you."
Given that most Bollywood directors are used to elastic shooting schedules and generous amounts of time, was The Sense of an Ending difficult to execute? "There is the challenge of less time and more to do but then I shot The Lunchbox in 30 days, so it was not that different," he says. For Batra, who left Mumbai to study abroad when he was 18, staying in London for an extended period while preparing and shooting the film was hard as he missed the grit and grime of Mumbai. Thankfully, he got to bring his family along which included his then three-year-old daughter Aisha, who was enrolled in a London school for several months.
FUTURE PERFECT
After wrapping the film in late 2015, Batra spent 2016 shooting Our Souls at Night. With two English features releasing, Indian audiences should be delighted to know that his next, like The Lunchbox, will be a quiet love story set in Mumbai, but with an international appeal. "I do believe that it is a matter of time before we make Indian stories with great Indian actors that will travel more than or as much as English-language cinema does," says Batra. We can only say Amen to that.
