Maverick filmmaker Q, best known for the subversive Gandu, takes on Tagore with his update on a 1933 play. Is the iconoclast trying too hard?
It is close to midnight and Q, often described as India’s most subversive filmmaker, is deep into a shoot. Cheap black and hospital-green curtains flutter in the background and the scene is lit only by a couple of overhead and side lights, besides the terrace’s own low-glow lighting system and three emergency lights. A skateboard is used for tracking shots and the camera is occasionally propped up on books.
But the blood that oozes, slowly and terrifyingly, from the mouths of the two elderly actors is the expensive imported stuff, violently red and thick, not the watery mixture commonly used in Indian cinema. Q is shooting a teaser trailer for Ludo, a tribute to Japanese horror films, dreamt up (and co-directed) by a longtime associate, the Vancouver-based Nikon. It will not be short of gore.
The 15-odd cast and crew members of Overdose—the production company headed by Q—go about filming the 35 shots scheduled for the night with the single-mindedness of marching ants. It is so quiet that locals figure out only hours later that a film is being shot in their South Kolkata neighbourhood.
Meanwhile, Q, a joint dangling from his lips, keeps aside the palm-fitting Canon 7D—his preferred camera—and takes a shot with his iPhone. The phone-camera shot, he explains later, has a context. The story of Ludo demands a long shooting schedule at a Kolkata Metro station. With the authorities seeking a fee of Rs 45 lakh—nearly half the film’s Rs 1 crore budget—Q covertly filmed reference shots in the Metro with his iPhone camera to complete a trailer for prospective buyers at the Cannes Film Festival’s cinema market. “What else do you do?” Q’s pockmarked face breaks into a smile, seemingly kicked at messing with the system yet again.
The terrace shoot showcases several characteristics of the Overdose work ethic: Low-budget, guerrilla-style filmmaking, a bias towards extreme cinema and its founder’s cocky irreverence towards authority and accepted social constants. The iPhone shot Q takes will be incorporated into the film at the editing table.
Shock-value could well be the USP of the maker of Gandu (2010), the belligerently titled black-and-white Bengali film that mocked many moral medians, including mother-son relationships and organised religion, overlaid with a vicious rap-punk soundtrack and finished off with a gloriously lit sex scene. Made at an astoundingly low budget, Gandu was previewed at Yale University, exhibited at counter-culture festivals such as Slamdance and was the official choice for film festivals in Berlin, Amsterdam and Helsinki, besides winning accolades in national and international publications.
So, at the previous edition of the Kolkata Literary Meet, when Q announced, “I hate Rabindranath Tagore,” nobody batted an eyelid. Yet, an adaptation of Tagore’s play Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards), which released in Kolkata and Mumbai in late August, could well prove to be Q’s biggest test. Notwithstanding his reputation as a quicktime cinema aesthete (he claims to be no more than a filmmaker with a “music video sensibility”), the only other one of his films to receive a commercial release—the badly etched Bengali film Biish—impacted neither audience consciousness nor cash registers.
It’s early days into the release, but consider the figures: Gandu, shot with a core crew and cast of about a dozen people, cost Rs 2.5 lakh; Tasher Desh features more than 100 actors and four major producers, including the National Film Development Corporation and Anurag Kashyap Films, and was budgeted at Rs 3 crore. Three years down the line, Gandu, created without regard for either the censor board or the box-office, seems a world of stakes away from Tasher Desh.
In the long interregnum between shooting and screening, Q was quoted as saying that his Tasher Desh would be “Tagore on acid”. At the Kolkata Literary Meet, a song sequence from the film—a furiously paced, jerky and energetic five minutes—left the audience reeling, while filmmaker Saeed Mirza hailed Q for pushing the envelope of Indian cinema. The film went on to be screened in the Cinema XXI section of 2012’s Rome International Film Festival.
On one occasion, though, the buzz seemed to backfire. On Tagore’s last birth anniversary, Q put up a ‘Dear Dadu, Happy Birthday’ poster on his Facebook page. While Dadu literally denotes a grandfather and sometimes colloquially refers to Tagore, the post, coming from the maker of Gandu, irked many of his 9,000-odd friends and followers on the social networking site. In angry responses, they labelled him insolent, gimmicky, wannabe, unworthy, publicity-hungry, shameless and threw in a couple of cuss words as well. “The folks at the office were worried that it was turning on us. Finally, I had to step in with a comment. That stemmed the tide somewhat,” Q admits.
Tepantorer Mathe was never completed but Rituparna soon found herself “sleeping around” with Kaushik. Lust paved the way to love that has lasted. Tepantor..., taking off from a Bengali folktale trope, also hinted at the Indian thematic core that would be central to all of Q’s documentary and feature films.
Though there have been many detractors, there is an element of regret in his voice when Q says that nobody has critiqued his recent work with any real impact. It is equally true that Q, with the good-humoured and disarming honesty of somebody who has earned his feathers, would be difficult to pin down. On different occasions, he has admitted to conceiving Gandu as a porn film, reasoning that sex was the original idea of humankind; to introducing coitus to lure audiences into a wider web of protest art; to not mastering any department of cinema but having a working knowledge of most (he is usually co-credited as actor, editor, cinematographer, scriptwriter, singer besides being the director); and as somebody, well, who is always stoned.
(This story appears in the 20 September, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)