“Please wear decent clothes.”
The instruction, simple yet firm, was relayed to a Std XI student as she came home from school one afternoon in 1968. It was from a mother who wanted her tomboyish daughter to discard her “gully cricket” look for an important meeting. The bemused teenager, who then lived in Delhi with an aunt, had no idea what the rendezvous was about.
It soon became clear that she was being considered for a lead role in an art-house Hindi film. And the meeting for which she was asked to look prim and proper was with its director.
The man, in his mid-40s, came home, narrated a story and even asked the girl if she would like a role in it. She played along, led by a sense of adventure. And before she knew it, she was on her way to Bhavnagar, Gujarat, for her first big-screen role.
More than 50 years since she first met Mrinal Sen, the director who made her famous as Gauri of Bhuvan Shome (the film was released in 1969), actor Suhasini Mulay still wonders why the filmmaker chose her for his first Hindi venture.
“I had heard of him because my mother [Vijaya Mulay] was also into filmmaking. I also knew that he had first seen me as a model for a Pears soap campaign I had done for Lintas. But how come I never asked him what made him think of me as Gauri, a village girl from Saurashtra,” Suhasini Mulay wonders.
In an interview after Sen’s death, Mulay also recalls how the enormity of the task of playing the female lead — “sharing the screen with an actor like Utpal Dutt” — hit her only when she reached the sets.
“Until then, it was like a fun thing I had signed up for. Imagine I hadn’t even asked who my co-actors were,” the Mumbai-based actor and documentary filmmaker tells BL ink on the phone.
Sen, however, wasn’t judgemental or dismissive of the young débutante. Even as she fumbled through the scenes, often forgetting dialogues, he stayed calm.
“Perhaps the only time he looked disgusted was when he took me shopping for clothes in Bhavnagar,” says Mulay. “I had to choose my own costume. And what I picked up was quite urban — completely different from what I finally wore. Mrinal- da didn’t buy any of the clothes I had selected,” she adds.
In Mulay’s mind, this perhaps was the only instance in the filming of Bhuvan Shome where Sen — who died in Kolkata at the age of 95 on December 30 — seemed keen to stick to what only he had in mind.
“Mrinal- da was a very democratic director. His sets were an extension of the person he was, his ideologies…Anybody on the sets — whether a spotboy or the assistant director — could approach him with ideas and suggestions. He treated everyone with equal respect,” says Mulay, who later assisted Sen in directing Mrigaya (1976).
A perfectionist who minced no words, Sen was open to learning from others, she stresses. “ Bhuvan Shome was his first Hindi film. It was also Utpal Dutt’s first Hindi film. There were many instances when I had to correct their Hindi, and they both appreciated it,” says Mulay who has also acted in films such as Hu Tu Tu , Dil Chahta Hai , Lagaan and Page 3 .
Looking back, she finds it incredible that men of their stature — Dutt was already an icon in theatre — didn’t mind being coached by a teenager who was not even serious about acting. “But that’s how humble and honest they both were,” she adds.
For Mulay, the success of the film — it won three National Awards (best feature film, best director and best male actor) — hit home only when she was invited for its screening at the Venice Film Festival. “I had left for Canada soon after I had finished school, so I missed the blockbuster phase of Bhuvan Shome . When I watched the film in Venice, I realised that it had become a milestone. But I also saw the flaws for the first time, from the eyes of someone who was also studying films,” she says.
When asked if it is her favourite Mrinal Sen film, she replies, “Not at all.” The film comes fourth on her list — after Ekdin Pratidin (1979), Akaler Sandhane (1982) and Khandhar (1984).
While working with Sen on Mrigaya , another critically acclaimed film that saw the début of actors Mithun Chakraborty and Mamata Shankar, Mulay was further impressed by Sen’s filmmaking. “It was raw energy at work. The experience was more enriching than acting for him in Bhuvan Shome .”
Assisting him behind the camera, Mulay also saw the softer, humorous side of a director who was considered “very serious and uncompromising”. “Mrinal- da ’s wife Geeta [who died in 2017] kept him grounded. And he knew how to laugh and be laughed at,” says Mulay, referring to the adda sessions at their Kolkata residence.
Though she kept in touch with the couple over the years, she didn’t see them very often. And the last time she met them both in Kolkata, in 2016, she again forgot to ask the director why he saw Gauri in her.