Samrat is not Sherlock'
Kavita Barjatya refutes rumours that her debut film is a spin-off of the BBC TV series, explains the break from the Rajshri tradition
She's a Barjatya yet her first production is not a sappy family drama but a thriller, Samrat & Co., revolving around 20 characters. Each has a dark secret. Even the sleuth, played by Rajeev Khandelwal, according to Kavita Barjatya is not the stereotypical "doodh mein dhula hero".
Kavita, the third generation of the filmy family, forayed into showbiz with TV soaps and after eight years of good bahus, bad vamps and no shades in between, was ready for a palate cleansing thriller.
Surprisingly, her father, Kamal Kumar Barjatya, who is the head of the family and the business too, showed an interest in murder mysteries during a period of convalescence two years ago and immediately said yes when she narrated this story writer-director Kaushik Ghatak had been working on for four years. "The rest of the family too has been extremely supportive," says the debutant film producer.
The breakaway from the Rajshri tradition does not end there. Kavita has used technicians who've never worked with the home banner before, including a host of composers who came up with a party song, Tequila Vequila, which is unlike anything we've heard in a Rajshri film'.
"My favourite film was my grandfather Tarachand Barjatya's Dulhan Wohi Jo Piya Man Bhaye, but the idea here is to reel in the youth since they are the main theatre going audience," she says, explaining the need to go for digital movement posters and a YouTube campaign made up of animation videos based on Ghatak's short stories.
Explaining why she chose to go with Rajeev Khandelwal, she reasons that A-listers are very busy and she didn't want to wait for their dates for two years: "Besides, as soon as we gave Rajeev the script, he memorised all the lines. That's the kind of involvement we were looking at."
So can we expect to see an Indian version of the BBC TV show Sherlock, given that Samrat seems to have a lot in common with the British sleuth played by Benedict Cumberbatch? "Sherlock Holmes is a benchmark for every detective. But I've read Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie and dada has grown up on Bengali literature. Samrat is very Indian. Yes, he uses a magnifying glass and wears a long coat but so did Karamchand," she argues.
Does she plan to return to TV's kitchen politics again with her partner-in-crime Ghatak? "No, as far as TV goes, creative stagnation has set in. Besides, it's an exhausting grind and right now all I can think of is going off on a 10-day break with no Internet or phone connection," she laughs, adding when she returns Ghatak will be waiting with a traditional love story and a quirky one. "And Samrat 2. We made this film with the idea of a franchise."
source:mumbai mirror
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