No more lonely hearts

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No more lonely hearts

Saturday, 08 September 2018 | Team Viva

No more lonely hearts

Director Kanwal Sethi talks about mature love stories and how we are more accepting of them. By Team Viva

Loneliness is an urban concept which is similar across world cities — London, New York, Bombay,” says Kanwal Sethi, director of Once Again, Netflix’s latest film release which has been making a mark on account of its story where two mature adults fall in love. The idea fascinated him as did that of a strong woman, a widow in urban India who wants to be independent.

The director, who divides his time between Germany and India,  believes that a change in content is happening gradually. “There is a change happening in the last few years. The way a story is told and also the audience, there is a process of maturing of both. I see a similar development all over Europe, especially in Germany. There are mainstream movies and arthouse ones and now both of them are moving in each other’s direction,” he says.

While Once Again grabbed eyeballs, Sethi is not exactly a newcomer to the craft. His first feature was a German film with Kulbhushan Kharbanda and was the story of an illegal immigrant, a Punjabi man, who meets a German wanting to leave Germany. “So there was one person coming in and the other was leaving,” he says.

Once Again, which many people initially compared to The Lunchbox as the promo indicated that Shefali Shah, the main lead, runs a restaurant and sends a tiffin to Amar, played by Neeraj Kabi, is quite different in treatment.

The director narrowed down on the cast of Shefali and Neeraj on account of several reasons. “I met quite a few people. Shefali had the maturity and the sensuality and also the bluntness that Tara needed as a human being. She liked the script and we decided that we would work together. I was very confident that Neeraj can bring the internal conflict of the character. The story has a rhythm. It has an outer drama but the inner drama for me was always bigger. One does not feel that he is acting,” he says.

Neeraj plays an actor who feels he can’t dance. Incidentally, the actor is a trained dancer. “Amar is a character who thinks that he cannot dance in his life and in love. But for me Amar can do it and this is his journey. Often things happen professionally and at the same time parallel things happen in life. There are bridges between the two,” he says.

But besides the two characters, there is a third, Mumbai, which plays an equally important role in the movie. We get to see the lesser known parts of the Millenium city. So there are no stock shots of Marine Drive or the Gateway but of the nooks and crannies that a local knows about. “I believe that the space that we live in tells a lot about us. During the writing it was conceptualised that both these characters are different and it was depicted through the city. It is the horizontal and vertical journey of the two lovers. That is why ‘Bombay’ as an idea has played a major role in the film,” he says.

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