Q (Kaushik Mukherjee)
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Kolkata Extreme | Down and dirty in Kolkata
Nandini Ramnath Fri, Sep 28 2012. Live Mint
The early years
Q [born 1959] honed his film-making skills in advertising in Mumbai and Sri Lanka. Back then, he was known as Kaushik Mukherjee, but is credited as “Qaushik” in his 2003 documentary Le Pocha, about the independent music scene in Kolkata. “I became Q slowly, through a painful birth,” he says. “Kaushik was being spelt with a K or a Q. As a kid I was known as Babla and all my friends call me that. Except for the teacher who took my attendance, nobody called me Kaushik.” Changing his name was part of a process of adopting a new persona, of taking the idea of Bengali [Indian] daak naams, or pet names, to its logical conclusion. “Q is like an ornament, an imaginative device, an artistic identity,” he says. “It’s still Kaushik Mukherjee who signs the cheques.”
Rituparna Sen
His partner in cinema and in life, Rii, officially Rituparna Sen, has the daak naam Payal, but is Goltu to Q and friends. When she met Q in 2003, she had spent two years modelling and acting in television. She thought his debut feature Tepantorer Mathe would give her a foothold in the movies. “I thought the film would make me a star, but I was heartbroken when I found it was not going to come out,” she says.
The two started seeing each other, and Rii got introduced to the film-makers who would turn out to be the leading lights of Kolkata Candid: Shyamal Karmakar, who edited Tepantorer Mathe, and Amitabh Chakraborty, who was making Bishar Blues. “I love films that are challenging and borderline and dangerous,” Rii says. “I will do anything for these three film-makers—they are crazy and difficult, but I love their work. Lust is not their prime focus.”
Rii is the common link between a set of films that has been challenging the norms of acceptability and decorum in the past few years. She has appeared in her partner Q’s Bishh, Gandu (2010) and the forthcoming Tasher Desh, apart from his documentary Love in India. Rii has also been featured in Shyamal Karmakar’s documentary Many Stories of Love And Hate. Except for Bishh, which was released in cinemas, these films have rarely been seen outside of special screenings and festivals.
It’s not hard to see why the Central Board of Film Certification would baulk at giving a certificate to Gandu (2010), whose very title [‘arsehole’] is an affront to conservative ears, or Cosmic Sex, whose serious approach to its subject is likely to be eclipsed by its handful of graphic scenes.
Shyamal Karmakar
Karmakar, an editor who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, is one of Q’s major inspirations. Karmakar’s documentary I Am the Very Beautiful, made in 2006, is a genre-defying exploration of the film-maker’s desire for a bar singer named Ranu Gayen. Karmakar makes no bones about his attraction to Gayen, who is attached to his friend. He asks her to sleep with him and films her semi-naked. Gayen is no shrinking violet either, and as director and subject come dangerously close, the documentary explores the nature of voyeurism and the difficulty of maintaining a pretence of objectivity or distance. Karmakar is in thrall of female sexuality, and unlike many other film-makers, he doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“My idea of sexuality was ruptured in Pune,” says 48-year-old Karmakar at his office at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata, where he heads the editing department. “I fell in love with women with different moralities and attitudes to morality.” Some film-makers explore dreams, some nightmares, while others confront their sexual fantasies, he says. “I want to tell the truth,” Karmakar says. “I am very scared to tell my stories, but telling them is important.”
Gandu
See Gandu (2010)
Cosmic Sex
Cosmic Sex includes ideas previously explored by Chakraborty in his 2006 documentary Bishar Blues, about Bengal’s Muslim fakir tradition.
Cosmic Sex is only Chakraborty’s second movie in 23 years after his experimental debut Kaal Abhirati. He is keen on releasing Cosmic Sex, made for a meagre Rs.80 lakh, in cinemas, preferably uncut. “I want a theatrical release—I want to ask my society if I can show this,” Chakraborty says. “I will go to the censors, the courts, the works. It’s a big risk that only a fool can take. I am the grand fool.”
Tasher Desh
Q’s musical Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards) is likely to come to cinemas first. Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s operatic critique of social rigidity, which was inspired by Lewis Carroll and written in 1933, Q’s fantasy adventure, about a prince who strains at his royal leash, will be premiered at the International Rome Film Festival in November and will be released in India in 2013.
Q says Tasher Desh has been in the making ever since he decided to become a film-maker. “Tasher Desh is an immensely popular production that is usually treated as a kids’ play,” he says. “In the neighbourhood in which I grew up, the guy who could sing would get the central character, the prince. I was the prince for the neighbourhood, but then I got demoted when the play was performed at school. I was horribly disappointed and vowed that this would be avenged.”
A trailer reveals that like in Gandu (2010), Q is jettisoning conventional storytelling modes in favour of an audio-visual head rush through a theatrical acting style, hand-held, highly mobile camerawork and rapid-fire editing. The film has been shot in West Bengal and Sri Lanka by Manuel Dacosse from Belgium. Q originally wanted the cinematographers who had worked with phantasmagoria specialists Takashi Miike and Gaspar Noé. “I didn’t care for the story—it is an experience, with its songs and its exotica,” Q says. “I believe in the present moment, not in stories. Tasher Desh is structured like a fairy tale, it’s metaphysical and metaphorical.”
Tasher Desh has been produced by Q’s outfit Overdose, Kolkata-based recording studio Dream Digital, Belgian company Entre Chien Et Loup, the National Film Development Corporation and Anurag Kashyap Films. The movie brings Q a few steps out of the Kolkata underground and into the mainstream—sort of. “I don’t think Tasher Desh will bring us into a mainstream that means palatable and marketable,” Q says. “I am trying to counter the fact that we don’t have channels of distribution for alternate content.”
Making two kinds of cinema simultaneously
Q is an agent provocateur with a plan. He has been assiduously working towards creating an alternative system of finance and distribution with Overdose (its business cards promise “explosive Indian content”). He collaborates with a tightly knit group of like-minded souls, some of whom he has grown up with, in the production of “cheap and dirty pictures about sexual, social or political extreme content that otherwise can’t be made”, on budgets of Rs.25-30 lakh, that will subsidize each other.
“Since a production house can’t operate on one production, our strategy is to go for two kinds of cinema,” he says. “We can make films like Tasher Desh, which is nothing like Gandu (2010) but carries the same spirit. If that works out, we have a killer set-up—we can make cheap, extreme films that are not bound by distribution in India.” The British sales agency Jinga Films distributed Gandu in foreign territories. “We can recoup the money internationally as well as keep up the fight of pushing the boundaries of viewership.”
The label Bangla Black has been set up expressly to launch regular attacks on the system. “These are all gambles, high-velocity risks, but they are not uncalculated,” Q says. Overdose Films has its hands full over the next several months: Q is also working on a documentary, Sari, a martial arts film and a project about radical writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, while his company will handle the line production for three international projects to be shot in Kolkata, including the trafficking drama Sold and a horror flick.
See also
Adult content in Bengali cinema Adult content in Hindi-Urdu cinema Adult content in Kannada cinema Adult content in Malayalam cinema Lesbian themes in Bengali films Lesbian themes in Hindi-Urdu films Lesbian themes in Malayalam cinema The Cloud Door/ Baadal Dwar
