Hitting a sixer

Srijit Mukherjee (kneeling) with his actors; Gautam Ghose, Aparna Sen, Parambrata Chatterjee and Chiranjit Chakraborty

By Shoma A. Chatterji

Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was first staged in 1921. Many years later, three directors, Lana Wachow-ski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Twyker directed Cloud Atlas (2012) where the directors narrated six diverse stories belonging to six different time-space worlds but with the same actors playing different characters in the six tales. An experimental film, directed by six Egyptian directors called The Mice Room (2013), made fear the basic premise that expanded to make space for other emotions like anxiety and loneliness. Though there are six stories, they finally emerge as one.
Srijit Mukherjee, known for digging into off-beat subjects to make mainstream films that are marked by a lot of pre-release promotional and marketing hype, decided to play it differently for his film, Chotushkone. He picked five directors to enact characters in his film. Though Srijit dubs the film as a ‘suspense thriller’, it traverses several genres, the main one being the self-reflexive genre that portrays four different stories of films-within-the-film.
“Let us say that there is no story at all. Why should there be a story at all in this magic world called cinema?” asks film-maker Gautam Ghosh who plays an important character. “Cinema is an experience for the film-maker the viewers may or may not like, but film-makers are always excited about the magic that cinema offers to play around with time and space,” he adds.
Srijit concedes, “It is about four directors who set out to pitch their films to a certain producer who lives on the outskirts of Kolkata. Each of them has to make a short film of 30 minutes. The producer has two conditions – one that each film must use death as its premise and that they must all travel to the producer’s residence for the pitch. As they set out to meet the producer, each one narrates his story to the others. This story than unfolds as a short-film-within-the-film. What happens when the journey ends is something that you will know when you watch the film.”
The four directors are portrayed by film-makers Gautam Ghose, Aparna Sen, Chiranjit Chakraborty and Parambrata Chatterjee, while Koushik Ganguly plays the producer. The sixth director is Srijit, who has written scripted and directed Chotushkone. He has kept the stories of the films-within-the-films nicely wrapped under covers. Parambratalooks back on the film as, “one of my most challenging and demanding roles till date.”
The smaller films feature a huge cast of good actors, mostly young, ranging from Payal Sarkar, Indrashish to Debolina Dutta and Konineeca Banerjee and others. Rabi Ranjan Maitra has edited the film. Producers Reliance Entertainment and Dag Creative Media have brought out an interesting poster that depicts four playing cards placed like a spread out deck against a red background. The four playing cards denote the King, Queen and Jack of Hearts along with the Joker. Do these cards symbolise the four directors? Or do they symbolise the stories of their films? Or, are they just put there for the audience to draw its own conclusions? No one knows.