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Sunday, Jun 10, 2007
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Japanese actor in the Sundarbans

Indrani Dutta

Chigusa Takaku is the female lead of Aparna Sen's movie `Japanese Wife'

Chigusa Takaku

Kolkata: She looked demure in her slender frame. A shaven head enhanced her petite form. She was unable to comprehend the words flying around her but she maintained her poise. After all, she has crossed international borders to reach the remote villages of the Sundarbans archipelago to shoot for an Aparna Sen movie that has already been test-marketed at Cannes.

Chigusa Takaku is the leading lady of Japanese Wife, a film shot in Kolkata, Japan and the Sundarbans. She understands very little English and studied oil painting at the University of Tokyo before joining films. It was her agent who helped her get this role.

For Aparna Sen, whose films have won accolades here and abroad, the venture marks many firsts. This is her first film shot outside India and that too with a foreigner as a leading lady. This is also the first time that she has followed someone else's storyline.

Japanese Wife has been written by Kunal Bose who teaches management at Oxford. It is about a timid village schoolmaster played by Rahul Bose, who strikes a strange relationship with his Japanese penpal Miyage, played by Chigusa.

The dialogues are in Bengali but the conversation between the male and the female leads are in English.

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