Blame it on the late hour after a long and tiring day with tough authors. Or maybe it was my general disenchantment with or disdain for anything that reeks of a biopic in the Indian cinematic landscape. Or could it be that the subject’s maverick credentials were playing on my mind? Making me think, ‘Anything is possible.’

For whatever reason, watching Anjan Dutt’s Chaalchitra Ekhon on Friday night, I conflated the words ‘Kunal Sen Inspired by Mrinal Sen’ in the film’s trailer to Kunal Sen being the protagonist’s name in the film and watched it under the impression that it was Mrinal Sen’s son (also named Kunal) who was actually playing his father. So striking was the resemblance to the photographs and videos I have seen of the legend that for the entire 90-minute duration of the film, I kept thinking: ‘Well, this is an inspired choice.’ It was only the next afternoon when I spoke of this to a friend that I stood corrected. Thank god I mentioned my take on the film and the performance, or else I might well have credited the wrong actor!

I am not sure if that says more of my ‘attentiveness’ to the film or of the verisimilitude of Anjan Dutt’s performance. Of course I went back to the film for the second time in less than 24 hours. I am glad I did that. For, the second viewing made me appreciate a few things that had escaped me the first time round. Though it also brought into sharper focus aspects of the film that had frustrated me the first time round.

First off, what works: Anjan Dutt. The actor is at the top of his game. Though it is not necessary for an actor to have a physical/facial resemblance to the real-life person he/she is playing (after all, General Patton looked nothing like George Scott or Liam Neeson to Oskar Schindler), Chaalchitra Ekhon works primarily because of what Anjan Dutt bring to his ‘Kunal Sen’.

Though the glasses and the wig help immeasurably, there is no doubt that here is an actor who studied his subject very well, very minutely, at close quarters, and retained the memories well over 40 years. Every scratch of the chin with the thumb, cigarette held between his fingers, every stretch of the leg while on the phone, every raised forefinger making a point, every ‘action’ and ‘cut’ standing next to cameraman J.K. Madhavan (Suprobhat Das reprising cinematography legend K.K. Mahajan) is spot on. It is a performance that is as much a tribute to his mentor as it is testimony to the observer and actor in Anjan Dutt.

One just wishes one could say that of the filmmaker on the strength of what we have in Chaalchitra Ekhon. I could never get over the feeling that the filmmaker invested so much of himself as an actor in pulling off Mrinal Sen that the rest of the film, as also many of the other performances, are almost on autopilot mode.

For one, there’s little that the film adds to what we already know. Anjan Dutt has spoken at length about his relationship with Mrinal Sen, how they met when the director was beginning work on his 1981 film Chaalchitra, and how that interaction changed the course of his life. There’s precious little that throws new light on either Mrinal Sen or Ranjan Dutt (Sawon Chakraborty playing Anjan Dutt) or the dynamics of their relationship visually.

Also, for a film that focuses on the director-actor relationship in the course of the making of a film that gave us a throbbing portrait of the city, Anjan Dutt’s Kolkata is strangely lame here. I barely got a feeling of the city that so exasperated and fascinated the two in equal measure, a city that made a film like Chaalchitra (and for that matter a number of Mrinal Sen films) possible. Anjan Dutt gives us a few striking numbers as his camera goes roaming the city streets, but they seldom convey the Calcutta of the 1980s. There’s also an almost criminal neglect of the two main women characters, Kunal’s wife Mita (Bidipta Chakraborty giving a fine account as Geeta Sen) and Ranjan’s wife.

However, the one unsurmountable obstacle that the film has is Sawon Chakraborty. Standing in for the young Anjan Dutt, the actor never quite delivers (unlike Anjan Dutt who did so in spades in Mrinal Sen’s Chaalchitra). This failure stands out glaringly in a couple of sequences. One, where Mita is narrating how she and Kunal fell in love, even as Ranjan, weary from the day’s shoot, dozes off and wakes up suddenly. One can almost hear the director asking him to ‘act’ sleepy and suddenly awake here.

Then there is the climactic sequence after the shoot for Chaalchitra ends and the young actor breaks down in the arms of his director. What should have been the film’s high emotional point – as the protégé realises what his mentor has come to mean – comes a cropper as Sawon makes a royal hash of it. As he does in the series of ‘rehearsals’ of Chaalchitra’s famous sequence where its protagonist speaks to the newspaper editor about the millions of coal ovens in the city, only to be flummoxed by the editor telling him, ‘You are a communist’.

At this juncture in the film, the director takes the young actor aside and tells him how at times an actor needs to probably put across just 30 per cent since 50 per cent is taken care of by the editing, another 20 by the camera, while at others an actor needs to do nothing at all as the camera, editing and music will do the needful. One cannot help but wish that in this case, the actor did put across something while reining in the exaggerated and perpetually-on-the-edge bits.

Then there are the inept sequences of the young actor – who thinks the city will never understand him, and who cannot wait to get away from it – coming of age, so to speak. There’s a badly done scene of Ranjan getting into a fight with his theatre compatriots, or a pointed one where he sits down to lunch with the extras at the shoot for the film’s production manager Bipul (Subhasish Mukherjee) to underline how the one film Kunal Sen makes in the year provides an opportunity for everyone to eat well and together.

There’s another really clumsy sequence in which Madhavan, the cinematographer, calls the actor to his room and, forcing him to drink, reiterates how he needs to look for the truth in ordinary people. These might well have been Anjan Dutt’s experiences in the course of being part of Chaalchitra but the way these underline Ranjan’s realisation of his privileged position is awkward and overstated. Always wary of mawkish sentimentalism in his films, one wonders what Mrinal Sen would have to say about what his protégé makes of these bits.

The mentor-protégé relationship is one of great dramatic potential. And there’s no doubt that this is a labour of love for filmmaker Anjan Dutt. In one sequence, Ranjan takes the screenplay of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex from Kunal Sen’s bookshelf, which the latter then signs and gives to Ranjan. There’s something organic and affecting about the way it plays out. Or at another point, Kunal Sen tells Ranjan how the moment he calls ‘cut’, the latter looks crestfallen with the weight of the world on him, while as long as he is ‘acting’ he is oblivious to everything around him. Chaalchitra Ekhon needed more of these self-reflexive aspects to make it a more illuminating kaleidoscope.

(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)