The trailer of Srijit Mukherji’s film Padatik dropped on Sunday, less than a fortnight before its release on Independence Day. Mukherji’s tribute to Mrinal Sen, the biopic is expected to capture the various facets of the towering personality of the maverick filmmaker.
A composite collage of scenes providing a glimpse of his evolution as a person and as a filmmaker, the two-and-a-half-minute-long trailer celebrates his philosophy of life and his unique creative vision. It captures the aspirations, struggles and frustrations of his youth, his anger and resentment at his own incompetency and how he blames himself for his failures.
As revealed earlier, Chanchal Chowdhury enacts the role of Mrinal Sen in the film. Besides an almost complete resemblance to the acclaimed auteur, the actor has attempted to bring the audience close to the soul of the man who was known to be a rebel and a non-conformist all his life. The trailer also offers hints that Padatik’s structure will mirror Sen’s narrative techniques and stylisations in his films, clearly as a form of tribute. The snippets of Sen’s films that are a part of Padatik’s trailer have been used cleverly. They highlight Sen’s principal concerns as a filmmaker and what shaped his attitude towards life and his work.
His relationship with his wife (Monami Ghosh) also forms a small but important part of the trailer. The support and motivation he got from her, especially at crucial and often precarious junctures of his career, are shown to be vital in providing him the determination and resolve he needed to continue making films, despite the odds. Being addressed as ‘comrade’ by his wife Gita reflects his socialist leanings, his sympathy for the working classes and the revolutionary cause. The inclusion of Salil Chowdhury’s famous inspirational song for the masses, Alor pathajatri, that urges the common man to rise up and revolt against injustice, also points to the fact that the film will celebrate his advocacy of a classless society through his works.
His uncompromising nature and perfectionism with respect to the content and style of his films are also highlighted in the trailer. So is the fact that he was a man of high principles and morals, who remained true to his self as well as to his art, no matter how heavy a price he would have to pay for it. The trailer also touches upon his views on cinema, the kind of messages he sought to deliver through them and of course, his success and recognition in the national and international arena.
