On the trail of a spy Princess
Saturday August 25 2007 15:01 IST
Saibal Chatterjee
His
long, eventful career has been built on a steady flow of films. Shyam
Benegal isn’t, ergo, accustomed to protracted inaction. His last
release, Bose: The Forgotten Hero, was completed all of two years ago.
“I am getting extremely restless,” the veteran director says. “I have
never had such a long fallow period in my career.”
It isn’t, however, just the forced hiatus that has had him a tad on
the edge of late; the lackadaisical manner in which the distributors
treated the Netaji biopic, a pure labour of love, still rankles. “That
film would have had a fair chance hadn’t it been so poorly exploited,”
he laments. “Imagine running a three-and-a-half-hour film at 11 at
night or at 10.30 in the morning. It had to sink.”
But that setback is now behind him, and the septuagenarian
filmmaker is moving on, with not one, not two, but three ventures
looming on the horizon. First up is the tentatively titled Mahadev,
which is scheduled to roll in September. “The idea has been with me for
a long time,” he says of the comedic film that will star Shreyas
Talpade and Amrita Rao. “It is about a young villager who is the only
literate man in his community and aspires to be a writer. He ends up
becoming a letter writer to the unlettered.”
Mahadev will see Benegal return to the rural Indian terrain that
has yielded some of his best films. From his very first directorial
outings, the epochal Ankur (1974) and Nishant (1975), to the more
recent Samar (1998), his cinema has frequently explored the hinterland
of a complex, constantly evolving nation grappling with debilitating
divides at various levels of existence — caste, gender, history,
modernity versus tradition…
Also on the Benegal anvil is what promises to be by far his most
ambitious film to date — an international spy drama about the real-life
Noor Inayat Khan, a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan. Her courage is
still commemorated in the UK and France, but she isn’t even a footnote
in Indian history. “I hope that will change once the film gets made,”
says Benegal. Noor’s story is indeed the stuff that riveting cinema is
made of: during World War II, she laid down her life working as a
British agent in Nazi-occupied France.
The upcoming film is being scripted by economist Lord Meghnad Desai
and his wife, Kishwar, who have bought the film rights to journalist
Shrabani Basu’s critically acclaimed book, Spy Princess: The Life of
Noor Inayat Khan. “It’s an outstanding story,” says Benegal. “It has
everything: human drama, heroism, intrigue, war…The book is the first
authoritative biography of Noor Inayat Khan, very well researched and
reconstructed. It’s crying to be made into a film.”
The scriptwriters, the director reveals, are currently on the third
draft of the screenplay. “They are now in India for a month-and-a-half.
By the time they return to London, the draft will have been wrapped up.
It’s flowing quite nicely,” says Benegal.
Noor, who was betrayed by double agents and shot by the Nazis in
Dachau in 1944 (she was only in her 20s), was a “strikingly pretty”
woman endowed with multiple creative skills. She was a singer,
broadcaster and writer of children’s stories. Says the director: “She
was as unlikely a war martyr as you can ever get. She was very quiet,
gentle and vulnerable, a woman who believed in the tenets of the Sufi
order set up in Paris by her father, sitar player and dhrupad vocalist
Inayat Khan (in 1909, he was the first Indian classical musician to
settle in the West). Subterfuge and violence were anathema to Noor. But
she was required to resort to both once she volunteered to be an
underground radio operator in France during the war.”
The screen adaptation of Noor’s tale of bravery and sacrifice, to
be shot entirely in Europe sometime next year, will be an
English-French-German film with a smattering of Urdu. “The cast and the
funding will obviously be international, but the film will have a
strong Indian involvement in both respects,” says Benegal. Has he homed
in on an actress for the character of Noor? “We will get to that only
after the script is ready,” he says. “The character can be played by
anybody from the younger lot of Mumbai actresses, but I am open to an
European, somebody like Monica Bellucci, for the part.”
Closer home, Benegal is still nurturing an idea that is all set to
roll but for the problems he has had with prospective producers —
Chamki Chameli, a musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s famed opera,
Carmen. He plans to shoot the film on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan.
“I haven’t abandoned that project. A R Rahman has already done a lot of
music for Chamki Chameli,” he reveals. “It needs a producer who is
willing to be patient and involved. It’s not the sort of film for which
you can go the location and start shooting.”
Talking of Rahman, wouldn’t he be the right man to score the music
for Spy Princess given his strong Sufi moorings? Benegal acquiesces:
“Indeed, it has to be somebody who has an instinctive feel for Sufi
thought as well as a developed sense of world music.”
