The Art of Transition

Praveen Lulekar

The laid back, eccentric journalist of the novel takes the form of Nilu Phule on screen and the image coincides with the raw shape your mind had formed reading the original. The haunting ‘ushaha kaal hota hota…’ compensates for all the descriptions and leaves you with a feeling of terrible helplessness – ditto the novel. Dr. Jabbar Patel’s Sinhaasan was, in many ways, a benchmark for transition of a novel to screen.

The art of transition has returned to Marathi cinema, this time as a trend. With Duniyadaari, Sat Naa Gat releasing this month and the recent successes like Jogwa, Natrang and Shaala, the trend seems to be catching up. We explore the reasons, the process and the difficulties of this experiment.

Sameer Surve, director of Shree Partner says there is no fixed process as such. “Va. Pu. Kale’s novel is written in a non-linear format and it suits a film’s narrative,” says Surve. For Renuka Shahane, who transformed her mother Shanta Gokhale’s novel Rita on screen, it was a mathematical problem. “I divided the events of the novel in several sections and arranged them in chronological order. I then kept the ones that were that were uniform with the main story of the protagonist,” described Shahane.

Talking about the “span” of a novel, Surve opines that all the elements cannot be brought into the film. Shahane, in fact, regrets the fact that she could not carry many elements of the novel. Rajan Khan, whose novel Sat Naa Gat has been made into a movie has a similar opinion, “Carrying all the elements on screen is not possible. There is a main storyline around which incidents are woven in a film.”

The actors have a huge responsibility of portraying a character written with such minute details in a novel.  “The character should go close to the audience’s perception and also not distance itself from the novel. The challenge is to find a common denominator,” says Padmanabh Bind, who played the lead in Shree Partner. Khan is extremely liberal with his approach in this case. “For me, the director is also a reader. And a reader has to be given the liberty to imagine a character with his own view. The director casts actors as per his perception of the character,” he says.

The most critical aspect is however giving justice to the novel. Dr. Anand Yadav, on whose novel Natrang was based says that he was satisfied with the product. According to Khan, the concept of justice and injustice is itself wrong. “The product may work or fail but it is never a waste. Also, the novel will always remain alive as an independent creation,” Khan adds. As far as the involvement of the writer in the film making is concerned, Dr. Yadav was completely aloof from it. Khan was also not insistent about writing on screen but remained available for discussions. “The people who know the visual medium should take care of that,” he says.

The trend highlights the dearth of good screen writers on one side, but it also allows directors to plunge in the wealth of the rich Marathi literature. “It is difficult to resist the temptation our literature offers. While it is difficult to form a 2 hour screenplay on an original idea, a novel offers you a screenplay of 7-8 hours,” Shahane summarises.  

            

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