Pratim D. Gupta’s film is a unique and entertaining take on love and the choices we are given to make when it comes to this ageless emotion
Cast: Paoli Dam, Arjun Chakraborty, Madhumita Sarkar, Anindita Bose, Anirban Chakrabarti
Director: Pratim D. Gupta
‘Everything is fair in love and entertainment,’ says a dapper power-dressed Madame K (Paoli Dam) – and the joy of watching Pratim Gupta’s new film lies in the fact that at the end of it you are not quite sure if indeed it is so … in entertainment, or what goes for it in contemporary society, and definitely in love.
Over the course of watching his films (barring Paanch Adhyay, which I am yet to watch), I have begun to sense a pattern to his films – and thankfully it is a lack of pattern. His films are not what they appear to be on the surface. Hence, Ahare Mon (2018), for all its engagement with longings of the heart, went beyond just that. Shantilal (2019) turned the whodunit on its head in ways that only someone supremely confident of his craft and his story can.
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is either an 'accidental' editor who strayed into publishing from a career in finance and accounts or an 'accidental' finance person who found his calling in publishing. He studied commerce and after about a decade in finance and accounts, he left it for good. He did a course in film, television and journalism from the Xavier's Institute of Mass Communication, Mumbai, after which he launched a film magazine of his own called Lights Camera Action. As executive editor at HarperCollins Publishers India, he helped launch what came to be regarded as the go-to cinema, music and culture list in Indian publishing. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema and the MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. He also commissioned and edited some of India's leading authors like Gulzar, Manu Joseph, Kiran Nagarkar, Arun Shourie and worked out co-pub arrangements with the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives, apart from publishing a number of first-time authors in cinema whose books went on to become best-sellers. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has been a regular contributor to Anupama Chopra's online magazine Film Companion. He is also a published author, with two books to his credit: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin Books).