Remembering Rituparno…
Dr. Ayiriddhi Bhattacharjee

Picking the right actor for a character was his forte as a
director. He not only offered great roles to Bollywood actresses
ranging from Sharmila Tagore, Rakhee, Kiron Kher, Aishwarya
Rai Bachchan, Monisha Koirala, Preity Zinta, Bipasha Basu to
Tollywood stars like Aparna Sen, Konkona Sen Sharma, Rupa
Ganguli, Mamata Shankar, Indrani Haldar, Debasree Roy,
Rituparna Sengupta, Ananya Chatterjee, Raima Sen and Riya
Sen. He also reinvented mainstream commercial actors like
Prosenjit Chatterjee with his masterpieces – Dosar, Khela and
Shob Charitro Kalponik. Tollywood actor Tota Roychoudhury’s
acting career got a new lease of life when he was first offered a
role in Ghosh’s Shubho Mahurat and then the role of ‘Behari’ in
his magnum opus Chokher Bali, which was Rituparno’s tribute
to Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s novel of the same name.
A self-confessed ‘chela’ (meaning disciple) of the iconic
Satyajit Ray, Rituparno, like his proverbial ‘Guru’, knew the art
of weaving grand narratives around characters and situations
and bringing out the inner conflicts of characters in a very
subtle, yet, straight-forward way. With every film that he was
making, this maverick film-maker and master story-teller was
setting new trends in the Bengali film industry and capturing
the sensitivities of women, inter-personal relationships and the
human psyche with rare understanding and insight. Rituparno’s
approach to film making was extremely independent. His forte
was his storytelling style. On most occasions, he wrote his own
stories and prepared his screenplays around them. All his movies
had a very distinct ‘Rituparno’ hallmark in them. His keen
attention to detailing, arranging the set, props, costumes and
accessories were testimonies of his passion towards the craft of
filmmaking. He was a worshipper of beauty, in its many forms,
and he possessed the uncanny quality of bringing out the beauty
and purity even in mundane things. Rituparno had carved out
an audience of his own across the country, who related to his
films.