SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE : A Character Analyst par excellence

 

SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE :

A Character Analyst par excellence

                              

As soon as the name of Soumitra Chatterjee is mentioned the image that appears in one’s mind is that of a smashingly handsome matinee idol of the big screen who had collaborated with Satyajit Ray in the latter’s 14 films. But as a passionate enthusiast of the art of acting, Soumitra Chatterjee appears in two avatars – one that of stage actor Soumitra and the other that of the film actor Soumitra. I have purposefully mentioned stage actor Soumitra ahead of the silver screen actor Soumitra. I believe, and certainly I do, that, stage actor Soumitra was far ahead of the silver screen actor Soumitra. For professional reasons, of course, he did prioritise his career in films. The medium of cinema has, of course, given him recognition, international fame, and a huge following at home. I consider seeing him act on the stage even once was a far enriching experience than seeing a number of his films. And this includes his films that he did for Satyajit Ray. I believe that, the viewer never gets to see the complete actor in him in the films he acted in, which perhaps number more than 200 including the Ray-ones, than he had the privilege to discover in a work of his on the stage.

Let me elucidate this point that I am trying to establish with an example. In 2012, Soumitra had staged a play Chhariganga (ref. theatrebengal.blogspot.com 26.4.2012) where he played the role of a scientist-philosopher. I had done a review article on this production for Desh. It was in the form of a letter that I had addressed to the thespian. I wrote that after seeing him act in numerous films, I, as an ardent theatre-lover, had felt that at the root of his artistic soul there was an out-and-out stage actor. I wrote that, for decades he had been contributing to the Bengali stage with a treasure trove of priceless gems of acting, theatre-making, and of course, play-writing, the values of which we are yet to be discerned, appreciated and admired. I confessed that we had failed to reckon with his total activities in the theatre world. And I added that, it is unfortunate that, we still go to the theatre to see ‘Soumitra’ and not his work.

Then, I recalled in my article that, way back in 1981, in a conversation with me, he had said that, acting is an affair of a couple of hours and an actor – a real good one – is ready, and is qualified to ‘reasonably’ interpret the human character of the play, or for that matter, the story. Then he had said that, he studies the character he would be portraying and deeply ponders on it. And then, he had remarked that, like the bistaar in a khayal rendition he gradually unfolds the character on the stage. This was a clear indication, I observed in my writing, that, at the central point of his thinking process there resides a stage-actor.

After discussing all other aspects of that particular production, I had written that, I had restrained from commenting on his performance – his rendition of dialogues, his intonations, his movements on the stage, his activities with his hands, his various looks, glances and gazes. They were all so very different from what we are used to see on the stage, usually. So, I admitted that, I was at a loss to describe or comment on his performance. I had then tried to explain with the instance that he had given of the presentation of khayal. I wrote that, in the bistaar of the aalap part of the rendition, the singer introduces the various notes of the raga to the listeners. The singer, I wrote, in his or her very own way establishes the notes and ventures into the virgin areas, and in that journey his or her fellow travellers are those listeners present at that very point of time. That is exactly, I pointed out, how he develops the character on the stage, as like the improvisations of the singer. With all his perceptions, cognitions and reasonings he turns the character into a person of flesh and blood. And the witnesses to such an act of magical transformation are not only the viewers on that particular day, but also the co-actors present on the stage with him.

When Soumitra used to construct those enchanted moments with his co-actors, the spectators could perceive the deep sense of involvement he had in the various activities of his fellow actors, too. And this resulted in an unbelievable truth being born in front of the spectators. This spontaneity is never possible in a film. As he had acting in his veins – in his organic make-up – he, may perhaps, did get to give this extra bit in a composite shot on the studio floor. But the viewers of his films seldom could observe such glimpses of his expressions either in the follow-through of his own deliveries or those of his co-actors. This is because in the making process of a film it is customary that, the director would add reaction shots to it and complete the particular sequence.

We see such instances in Ray films, too. Let us take an instance from Soumitra’s first film, Apur Sansar. There is a sequence when Apu rushes down the stairs to fetch a maid for Aparna, and the latter calls him back. Apu quite dejected on his financial incompetence to provide a helping hand for his newly wed, walks back into the room and sits on the bed, flinging the flute, crossing his legs and looking the other side. His reaction continuity is captured by Ray with a reaction close up of Aparna’s cute yet sly smile and Apu’s annoyed expression. But the viewers miss the reaction of Soumitra’s Apu, a few frames of which remain at the cutting point of the first part. If this particular sequence were to have been presented on the stage, the spectator would have had the experience of perceiving the totality of the reaction of the actor Soumitra. It is interesting to note, though coincidental, that the camera angle of the shot is akin to the spatial relation of the stage and the spectator.

But then how has he been so successful as a screen actor? Apart from his attractive looks, his radiance, his aura (which, by the way, had once been the prerequisites for an actor to upgrade oneself to the image of a matinee idol), he applied the same process of interpreting a character and working it out, even for the segmental shots, as he would for the stage with the help of his own intellectual perception. His fathomless talent, perhaps, helped him to do so, on the shooting floor, and that too, in a very short time. And therein lies the secret of a complete stage actor. The deeply imprinted philosophy of stage acting helped him to apply that lesson very successfully to screen acting, keeping all the conditions of the film medium unaltered. He made use of the camera and its lenses with such brilliance that one wonders why did he not make a film of his own.

It is often said that acting or rather the expressions should remain a bit subdued in films as because the camera amplifies them on the big screen. Does it imply that in order to make the last row see and hear what is being done on the stage, stage acting has to be high strung? If one had seen Soumitra on the stage one would perceive how restrained, and how natural he was in his expressions. In this respect, in one of his articles on Sisirkumar Bhaduri he gave the example of the latter’s rendition of Jibananda in the play Soroshi. Soumitra wrote that, Bhaduri never showed any heroic outbursts, that was very common even in the present days. Bhaduri’s acting, according to Soumitra, was so reclusive and suggestive, that it was rare to witness even in the modern times. We know that Bhaduri’s genre was successfully carried forward by his ardent follower Soumitra. It would be prudent to give another example to justify my above statement. Those who have had the privilege in seeing Soumitra’s acting as an over-drunk in Nilkantha knows what I am hinting at. One is astounded to find Soumitra’s analysis of Sisirkumar’s acting as Jogesh in comparison to that of Nimchand, both being a drunkard’s part. It becomes obvious why Soumitra was so great as a stage actor.

He has done numerous characters in his whole life and for almost all of them he had tried to ‘reasonably’ interpret them with his own logic and by his own reasoning. He certainly enjoyed a greater freedom in working out the character on the stage than he was in the cinema for obvious reasons. In a different context he had told a film-fan of his that the actor was ‘helpless’ in regard to cinema acting which according to him was a ‘dependant art’. As because the actor reaches the viewer via the screenplay writer and the director and the cameraman and the editor, the viewer can never get him in his completeness. But on the stage the actor, especially a cerebral one, infuses the character he is playing with whatever is needed, judging all the reasons and logic, and present the character in flesh and blood. He gets the chance to instantly improvise in front of the spectators and, thereby, establishes a direct communication with them.

And if the cerebral actor happens to be a poet, an erudite scholar, and a man of letters, then these instantaneous creativeness on the stage becomes individual pieces of haiku. For one who has had the fortune to watch Soumitra perform on stage, these sparkling moments remain indelible in their memories. But have we had the chance to experience such scintillating moments in films? In cinema his brilliance is in his total characterisation of the person he has been assigned to portray. Or, in the other way round, it can be said that, it depends on how efficiently the director employs his brilliance on the screen. Naturally, here the reference of Satyajit Ray creeps in.

Writing about Uttam Kumar in an article in Sunday just after the latter’s death in 1980, Ray gave his initial impression about the heart-throb of the Bengali film-goers like this, ‘Uttam had good looks, a certain presence, an ease of manner, and no trace of the theatre in his performance’. His impressions of working with him was very striking. He noted, ‘I must say working with Uttam turned out to be one of the most pleasant experiences of my film-making career. I found out early on that he belonged to the breed of instinctive actors. I have worked with the other kind too, the cerebral one, the one that likes to take a part to pieces and probe into background, motivations, etc., in order to ‘get beneath the skin of the character’. But the fact is, that there is no guarantee that a cerebral actor will make a more substantial contribution than an instinctive one. I hardly recall any discussion with Uttam on a serious, analytical level on the character he was playing. And yet he constantly surprised and delighted me with the unexpected little details of action and behaviour which came from him and not from me, which were always in character and enhanced the scene. They were so spontaneous that it seemed he produced these out of his sleeve. If there was any cognition involved, he never spoke about it.’ He finished off his writing like this, ‘…Uttam’s work shows rare virtues of grace, spontaneity and confidence. Such combination is not easy to come by, and it is hard to see anyone taking his place in the cinema of West Bengal in the near future.’

Ray’s study of Uttam and his work needs circumspection. He says Uttam had ‘no trace of the theatre in his performance’. Uttam, in fact, did not have any theatre background. One who is familiar with Uttam’s earlier films would remember that, apart from his attractive smile and good-looks there was a particular stiffness in his movements and expressions, that smirked of a naïve actor. Of course, he matured with time. Ray termed him as an ‘instinctive actor’ who would present the character superficially and without getting ‘beneath the skin of the character’, and who would add ‘unexpected little details of action and behaviour’. The wetting of the fountain pen nib by dipping it in the glass of water to sign an autograph, (Nayak) was one such improvisation that even warranted Ray’s praise. But what about Soumitra, who in a span of thirty-two years had been Ray’s lead role in fourteen of his feature films? Didn’t he have the ‘rare virtues of grace, spontaneity and confidence’? Then why did Ray never mention Soumitra’s name in any of his articles in the English language that he wrote for the English-speaking world? Why did he keep mum, when he had mentioned names of Chunibala (‘Pather Panchali could never be made as Chunibala is no longer there.’), Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Chhabi Biswas (‘our greatest actor’), Tulsi Chakraborty, and even Shabana Azmi (‘one of our finest dramatic actresses’), or, for that matter, Suhasini Mulay and Dhritiman Chatterjee, whom he had placed in the ‘star’ creed. But Soumitra Chatterjee, incredibly though, remains absent in his discussions.

We do get an indirect reference in these words – ‘I have worked with the other kind too, the cerebral one, the one that likes to take a part to pieces and probe into background, motivations, etc., in order to ‘get beneath the skin of the character’. Surprisingly, he does not give extra credit to this cerebral actor. He says, ‘there is no guarantee that a cerebral actor will make a more substantial contribution than an instinctive one’.

Ray was comfortable, it seems, with those actors who were not been bitten by the theatre bug, that is, those who had no theatre training, and were less, or rather, not analytical in their handling of the characters. He could transform his meticulously written, programmed and chalked out screenplays into screen-images with these types of actors, who would carry out to the details, what he wanted. Did he give Soumitra that freedom to express his spontaneity, his confidence to interpret in his own way? This was quite obvious in his playing of Sandip in Ghare-Baire.

In a conversation with yours truly, Soumitra had once said that, he had failed to understand the character of Udayan Pandit (Hirak Rajar Deshe dir. Satyajit Ray). Was he a detective? Was he a terrorist? Was he a spy? Was he an athlete? Or, was he a patriotic intellectual? But on the other hand, he was very ambitious about the role of Khidda (Kony dir. Saroj Dey), which he thought he could do justice to. So, as an actor he had been looking for a space where he could keep himself in the shadow and bring the character in front of the footlights and introduce the soul of the character to the spectator.

For the method-acting process of Stanislavsky’s school of stage-acting, where the actor has to transform himself into the ‘fictional first person’ (The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: an fMRI study of acting., Steven Brown, et al. Royal Society Open Science, 2019), the actor has to probe into the emotional truth of the character. When in Homapakhi one becomes a witness to such an inquiry by a manic-depressive university professor, one discovers Soumitra Chatterjee as an analyst par excellence.