Synopsis
The Japanese Wife narrates the
love story between a simple schoolteacher Snehamoy
(Rahul Bose) and a Japanese girl Miyagi (Chigusa
Takaku) that began with the two exchanging letters
across the miles that keep them distanced from
each other for all these years. They even get
married without ever having set eyes on each other.
Snehamoy has been brought up by his widowed aunt
Maashi (Moushumi Chatterjee) who dotes on him
and keeps nagging him to get married. Then one
day, Snehamoy gives her the shock of her life.
He tells her that he is already married to a Japanese
girl...
The Japanese Wife is a somewhat unusual
name for an Indian film. But, it should come as
no surprise since it is being made by Aparna Sen,
whose path breaking directorial debut was also
a film with an English title, 36
Chowringhee Lane made more than 20 years ago
and like The Japanese Wife, it was an
English film. Unlike her peers Mira Nair and Deepa
Mehta, Sen is rooted in India and gets Indian
producers to direct her films. The Japanese
Wife is produced by Saregama, which Sen recently
joined as creative director.
“It is not completely in English as there
is a smattering of Bengali dialect of the kind
spoken in the Sundarbans in West Bengal. English
was chosen as the principal language to reach
a wider audience, that’s all,” explains
Sen when asked, adding, “you will get to
hear some Japanese as well,” explains Sen.
 What
sets The Japanese Wife apart from other
Sen films is that for the first time in her career,
Sen is making a film on someone else’ s
story. The film is based on a novel of the same
name authored by Kunal Basu who teaches Management
Sciences at Oxford. “My original plan was
to make a fictionalized film of the five trekkers
from Jadapur University who died last year in
a trekking tragedy. Then during discussions with
Kunal, he narrated the storyline of his unpublished
work, The Japanese Wife and I changed
my plans, deciding to make this film instead,”
she elucidates.
Rahul Bose says he is playing one of the most
challenging and difficult characters in his entire
career in films. “I love to work in Aparna’s
films and consider myself lucky to have been chosen
by her to play important roles in three of her
films one after the other. In the earlier films,
namely Mr.& Mrs. Iyer and 15
Park Avenue, I did very urban characters.
Here, I play something that is radically different
not only from the films I have already done, but
also in terms of the character I play. I am a
rustic, simple schoolteacher who grows from a
teenage of 17 to a mature man of 40 and the dimensions
are intriguing indeed. I teach arithmetic and
am a shy, introvert, and slightly timid young
man. I am not bothered about the young widow Sandhya
who is my neighbour, yet, I strike up a relationship
with a girl I have never seen. The way I read
Snehamoy, he is an escapist. He has his Maashi
to take care of him where he lives and works,
and he has his wife in distant Japan, a woman
he has never met, so he does not have to carry
the baggage of responsibility that marriage entails.
For him, this side of the river, the Sundarbans,
offers a safer cocoon than life on the other side
of the river, filled with competition, affluence,
power, and relationships. He is safer on his side
of the river and does not even wish to venture
out to the other side. Where can I discover love
in all this, tell me?”
What is Moushumi Chatterjee’s take on her
first film with a person she once shared screen
space with? “I play Snehamoy’s aunt
in the film. She has brought him up. She is like
a tender coconut – hard on the outside but
soft inside. The character I play is touched up
with subtle comic touches and I speak my lines
with the typical dokhno accent used by the local
people of the Sundarbans. Thanks to theatre person
Sohag Sen and her workshops, I have been able
to acquire some command over the accent to make
it seem credible in the film. Sohag Sen should
be credited for having selected me for this character
in the first place. I had read the script and
had liked it. I even had to gain weight for the
role. My only regret is that Rina-di (Aparna Sen)
has directed a host of veteran actors. Then why
did it take her so long to realise that as an
actress, I too, have potential? But she is really,
really a wonderful director,” she sums up,
dressed up in the borderless white traditional
Bengali widows wear.
Raima Sen plays another important character in
the film. She is Sandhya, a rustic girl who is
a neighbour of Snehamoy and his Maashi. She is
a child widow but she does not wear widow’s
weeds. Joysree Dasgupta, a Rabindra Sangeet exponent
in her own right, is designing the costumes for
this film. She has given a typical rustic look
to the beautiful Raima, saree worn Bangla style
but tied up at the waist and a little above the
ankles in the usual style of young village girls,
hair tied up in colourful ribbons without a trace
of make-up on her face. “I must thank Sohag
Sen for the grilling she gave me in the 25-day
workshop before shooting. It is a gift to be able
to work in an Aparna Sen film,” she says.
“This film is purely a love story. It does
not have any message, nor does it contain a political
agenda. Love, I believe, is the only way out of
this moral and social decay the world is going
through. If this is the message that gets across
to my audience, then that is fine with me. But
I did not consciously put it there. Love, I think,
is the only emotion that can bring back our respect
for the values that are getting lost today. It
is for my audience to decide whether it is a love
story or whether there is a subtle agenda flowing
like an undercurrent right through. Then there
is the question of the art of letter writing.
In this age of electronic correspondence like
the e-mail, people have stopped writing letters
to each other. But it is such a moving emotional
experience. I still feel it has the emotional
touch e-mails and faxes can never have,”
says Sen.
The film has been shot on an ideal location in
a fisherman’s cooperative the team happened
to chance upon near Kolkata’s Eastern Bypass.
The producers then put up a complete set costing
around Rs.15 lakh to set up the entire structure
including the house in the middle of a water land
and even grow vegetation over time to give it
the ambience and look of reality. They have shot
some scenes in Japan and there has been extensive
location shooting in the Sundarbans, “where
is was so hot and humid that you would get completely
soaked in sweat the minute you came out of your
bath,” informs Rahul. Others in the cast
are Kunal Basu himself in a brief cameo and Rudraneel
Ghosh who plays an interesting character –
that of a youngster who is obsessed with flying
kites. Anway Goswami, fresh from FTII, Pune, is
doing the cinematography while Gautam Bose has
done the production design. Let us wait and watch
for this ‘modern day fairy tale’ to
unravel itself on the large screen.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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