Dawn of a new Kal?

Ruchi Narain makes her debut with a robust, sweeping tale, writes Saibal Chatterjee.

In person, the soft-spoken, thirty-something Ruchi Narain exudes a frail, fragile, feminine air. Her debut feature, Kal - Yesterday and Tomorrow, however, has none of those qualities: it is a robust, sweeping tale that crackles with energy and displays loads of confidence. It gets into the kind of 'virile' narrative terrains and generic conventions that a film made by a woman, especially one by a debutante, is hardly ever expected to do.

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"The form and style of my film is not Indian," says Narain, "but the story, with its strong emotional core, is very Indian." While she loves watching Hollywood movies - that probably explains the style that she adopts in Kal - she invariably "finds something missing in them in terms of emotions". Kal - Yesterday and Tomorrow, produced by filmmaker Sudhir Mishra, seeks to strike a balance.

The film is in the main Asian Competition section of the 7th Osian's-Cinefan Film Festival.

Ruchi Narain makes a confident debut with Kal - Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Daughter of a peripatetic corporate executive, Narain grew up on a staple of television serials and stray films in places like Dubai, Colombo and Muscat. She always knew that she wanted to make films. "I had no idea how I would do that for I didn't know anybody in the film industry," she says.

At one juncture of her progress in Bollywood, Narain actually spurned an opportunity to serve as assistant director to Karan Johar during the making of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. "I knew that the film would be a runaway hit, but it wasn't the kind of cinema that I wanted to do," she says.

"I would love to make a blockbuster that makes $50 million at the box office. Who wouldn't? But I will never make a film that does not reflect my personality and beliefs," the first-time director asserts. 

Little twists of fate later, she found herself assisting Sudhir Mishra, after working as an apprentice on the urban thriller Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin. "I got involved with the scriptwriting process. I knew I had to understand the nuances of writing before I could make my own film," Narain says. She subsequently worked as associate director and co-writer on Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Calcutta Mail.

One rather unhappy experience that Narain would like to live down is her association with Sunhil Sippy's Snip, the script of which is credited to her. "The film did not turn out quite the way that I had written it," she recalls. That, of course, hastened Narain's decision to become an independent director. "If my script has to be made a hash of, I thought I should do it myself," she quips.

Having spent nearly a decade in the industry, the lady has now gone and done just that. Only, Kal - Yesterday and Tomorrow isn't the sort of mess that Snip was. It could jolly well have been. At crucial points in the film, Narain seems to chew off more than she can digest.

Indeed, Kal - Yesterday and Tomorrow flirts with danger all the way through. It seeks to do too much. It melds an array of genres - a love story, an urban angst drama, a saga of corporate intrigue and a murder mystery. If the film emerges largely unscathed from its dizzyingly zigzag narrative trajectory, it is primarily because of its integrity and its undeniable stylistic flair.

Much of the film, by Narain's admission, is drawn from real life - her own. The pain of the female protagonist, Bhavna Dayal (played brilliantly by Chitrangada Singh), the photographer-daughter of a corporate honcho (Boman Irani) who cannot get over her messy break-up with her husband, social climber Tarun Haksar (Shiney Ahuja), contains elements of autobiography.

"I have been in this situation myself," says Narain. "I understand the feeling." That apart, most of the other characters that parade across the screen are people she has known or encountered in Mumbai. But Narain asserts that Kal is essentially an outsider's view. "The film revolves around personal experiences all right, yet I am not really one of these people," she says.

Some people feel that one of the crucial narrative strands of Kal - the spectre of a split in a big industrial family - has a prophetic ring to it. "That's just a coincidence," says Narain. "I wrote the script of Kal three years ago and had no way of knowing what was coming."

As Kal awaits D-day, Narain is understandably wary. "Until the film actually hits screens (in mid August), the weight won't be off," she says. "The fate of the film will depend crucially on what kind of initial audience we can get into the multiplexes."

Kal is upon us. Can the day after of a promising filmmaking career be far away? This is one tomorrow whose time has indeed come.