More than three decades after Satyajit Ray made a film on Rabindranath Tagore's eponymous work "Ghare Baire," young filmmaker Reema Mukherjee is making a Hindi movie inspired by the famous novel.
While Tagore's famous work, written in 1916, dwelt on the Swadeshi movement, a cultural protest against western ideas posing a challenge to the traditional thinking, Reema's "Ardhangini Ek Ardhsatya" is set in the first decade of the present millennium.
"In my film, I tried to get answer to questions that arose in my mind while reading Tagore's novel," the Mumbai-based writer-director told PTI here.
The three famous characters-Sandip, Nikhilesh and Bimala-are played by Subrat Dutta, Subodh Bhabe and Srilekha Mitra respectively.
"My objective was to merge the sensibilities of the two strands of regional cinema - Marathi and Bengali - through the actors established there.
Asserting that she was not afraid of her work being compared with Ray's 'Ghare Baire,' where Soumitra Chatterjee (Sandip), Victor Banerjee (Nikhilesh) and Swatilekha Sengupta (Bimala) played the principal characters, Reema said, "I feel the previous film adaptation of 'Ghare Baire' was more simplistic with all respect to the great film maker."
Asked why she did not use Rabindra Sangeet in the film, Reema said, "While music plays an important role in 'Ardhangini...,' there is no scope for Tagore songs. In fact there was no Tagore song in the original novel."
She said she did not feel the need to introduce a Tagore song just because she was adapting a Tagore classic.
Celebrated singer like Sukhwinder Singh, Hariharan, Vasundhara Das, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Raghav Chatterjee have lend their voice to film's album.
The project has primarily been shot in Gujarat, near Sundarbans in West Bengal and in Mumbai. The film is scheduled to release on July 1.
