Bose, split wide open

Rahul Bose

What makes Rahul Bose, one of our most critically acclaimed actors, tick?

Fame has come to Rahul Bose in dribs and drabs. Its presence, till now, was evanescent, fleeting like a flickering bulb.

But with the release of Vinta Nanda's White Noise, an acclaimed performance in Aparna Sen's Mr and Mrs Iyer and a chancy, exuberant directorial debut, Rahul Bose is threatening to become ubiquitous.

He's not allowing his presence on the nation's billboards to cramp his style, though: he remains, with varying degrees of success, a committed rugby player, writer and articulate advocate of a variety of causes.

Typically for him, Bose seems to have fallen into films entirely by accident. He abandoned a burgeoning advertising career to make English, August, the quirky film based on Upamanyu Chatterjee's novel, and has been slipping on and off the silver screen ever since.

He has a horror of the conventional Hindi film, and has spent his career so far off the middle of the road, it's surprising he hasn't fallen off it all together.

In an industry rife with scandal, cut-throat competition and one-hit wonders, what sets Bose apart is the fact that he has never consciously sought out the limelight, that he chooses films for their ideological content rather than commercial viability.

And although he doesn't hit the jackpot every time (in fact sometimes he seems to go out of his way to avoid it, for instance with Mumbai Matinee), you have to laud him for his adventurousness and commitment to a kind of Indian cinema different from the glitzy caricatures that typify the industry; and once in a while, in the right film, for example in Mr and Mrs Iyer, we catch a glimpse of what Rahul Bose is truly capable of.

Despite mostly sinking without a trace at the box office, Rahul Bose's films distinguish themselves by the subject matter they deal with.

Everybody Says I'm Fine satirised the hollowness of Mumbai's elite, and explored the brittleness of human relationships; Bombay Boys looked at various issues from homosexuality to the Mumbai film industry; and Chameli and Split Wide Open both dealt with life on the street and issues of sexuality.

With the exception of Bombay Boys, none of these films fared very well commercially, or for the most part critically, but Bose managed to duck the brickbats.

Chameli and Split Wide Open were both saddled with unrealistic plots, stilted dialogue and, in the former case, Kareena Kapoor. Bose's directorial debut, Everybody Says I'm Fine was widely welcomed as a breath of fresh air in a tired industry, but got mostly poor reviews at home and abroad.

A New York Times review compared it unfavourably to Mel Gibson's What Women Want, and said that the only positive thing about it was "that it is quieter and more realistic than the Bollywood spectacles that are India's best-known movies". (It is a testament to the state of Bollywood when a film about a mind-reading hairdresser is called "more realistic" than most commercial Hindi films.)

Nevertheless, the film stood out as an attempt to stretch the remit of Indian cinema, play with concepts of narrative and even dabble in magic realism, and again set Bose apart from the rest.

It was typical of Bose in its unusualness; by this point, no one could imagine him in a "conventional" role.

He did, however, "to get the monkey off my back" he jokes, do one commercial film: Jhankar Beats.

This is perhaps his one and only commercial success, but he insists that he does not want to go down that route again: "I just wanted to prove to everyone that I could do something a bit lighter, something slightly different," he says.

"I only do films I want to do, not ones I have to do. I listen to my conscience and my heart."

A little disingenuously, he adds, "My career is not significant enough to be affected by box office hits or flops. I'm completely unaffected by the multiplex phenomenon "" if my films are hits, this happens purely by chance. White Noise is being called a hit now, and while I'm very happy about it, this isnot why I made it. I just ask that a film has some kind of resonance, a deeper richness than just being a film."

Illustrating this, Bose adds that White Noise is important to him for its ideological value: "When I read the script, I found it great that a female character was depicted in this way, as neurotic and self-destructive, but also sensitive and brilliant. Images of women such as this in our films today are constantly tarnished "" it was important to me to show this kind of woman in a positive, or at least somewhat honest, light, and to show that it was possible for her to attract a man who is secure in himself. I wanted to play that man."

This commitment to the philosophy of a film is what attracts, and probably will continue to attract Bose. Sometimes this has trumped more mundane "filmi" considerations, such as plot, dialogue, or character development (perhaps most glaringly evident in Split Wide Open and Chameli), to the detriment of the product.

Conversely, however, the same mantra has also allowed him to work with directors such as Aparna Sen and Dev Benegal; allowed him to direct his own films that lead us away from the conventional; led Salman Rushdie to wax lyrical and cast him as Salim Sinai in a BBC Production of Midnight's Children; and, although he does not admit it, made him one of India's brightest acting talents.

BOSE SPEAK

Where do you see English-language Indian cinema going today, and how far has it come from the days of English, August and Bombay Boys?

I think that English, August and Bombay Boys paved the way for a lot of the films that are being made today: they proved that films can be made within a certain budget and still be commercially viable.

Nowadays, a lot more films are being made that are small-budget and that deal with issues outside of what the mainstream cinema can deal with. We cannot even speak of them all in the same breath as "crossover films": we have to look at them in the context of their different genres of comedy, tragedy, drama and so on.

Do you think these films are changing the perception of Indian cinema abroad, from the "colourful" and "flamboyant" films of Bollywood?

Most of what the west says about our films is true: we are "colourful" and "flamboyant". But we also have a new genre of art house films that are emerging in international cinema and will slowly begin to make an impact.

The first thing to realise is that there is no anxiety or desperation to "cross over". And the term itself, in any case, is restrictive.

We can say that Norah Jones's music "crosses over" from jazz and appeals to people in terms of pop. But here, people use the term "cross over" in a much narrower sense, and it begins to mean much less.

Two commercial films you've done that stand out in your career are Mumbai Matinee and your only Hindi film, Thakshak. What made you pick these two roles?

I think these were both great roles. My character in Mumbai Matinee had a deep underlying pathos, and the script actually looked much funnier on paper than it turned out to be on film.

As for Thakshak, one factor was that I was always wanted to act with Govind Nihalani. I don't really have any real problems with doing commercial cinema, as long as I do not have to do anything illogical as part of it.

What's next for Rahul Bose?

I have three more films releasing; Kaal Purush in Bengali, where I play a lower middle class man, who, by all recognised parameters of success, is a failure.

But he's a gentle man, husband and father, and over the course of the film, he shows his little heroisms, which make us question at the end what real success actually means. I'm very proud of my role in this film, it's the toughest I've ever played.

The next is a drama by Aparna Sen in English, 15 Park Avenue, a beautiful story with aching sensitivity. The character I play segues from a 25-year-old to a 36-year-old, married with children.

The last film is Khalid Mohammed's Silsilay, which is a more commercial Hindi film, where I play a "Mr Cool", with a mobile phone in each hand and a girlfriend on each arm.