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The artist and the muse

The royal artist: Santosh Sivan and Karthika in Lenin Rajendran’s ‘Makara Manju.’

There was a boy who grew up listening to stories from Indian mythology. His grandmother narrated them with such passion and drama that it made him curious about visual details of the characters. How big are Jatayu’s wings? Is Shakunthala beaut iful? Is Krishna really blue in colour? To answer his questions, the grandmother always resorted to the Raja Ravi Varma oleographs that were put up on their walls.

That was the boy’s first tryst with images. He was fascinated by the way the characters and colours were depicted in the compositions, even more by the possibility of story telling with images. Thanks to the imaginative grandmother and the artistic ambience around him, the boy grew up to be one of India’s finest image makers. Santosh Sivan, as we know him now, has acknowledged Ravi Varma’s influence many times before in many ways.

Santosh has skilfully and intuitively adapted Ravi Varma’s fine art into the popular art of cinema by blending the essence of Ravi Varma’s iconography and style into his cinematography. He paid his tribute to the man whom he refers to as the “source of earliest visual education,” through his film ‘Ananthabhadram,’ which had a song picturised on Ravi Varma’s paintings. But the tribute trail does not end there.

The real one is to follow, as Santosh gears up to don the grease paint for the first time to portray Raja Ravi Varma in a feature film directed by Lenin Rajendran.

“It is like learning a new language. I get a kick out of diversifying into many other activities. It gives you a different kind of energy,” says the director-cinematographer.

“I am excited at the chance of getting a peep into the mind and life of the painter I admire. Till now, I have only looked at his work,” adds Santosh, who is all set to play the lead in Lenin’s forthcoming ‘Makara Manju.’ “It is basically a chamber film, I presume. My part is almost like a double role, juxtaposing the artist himself with the character he paints. It is as if he transforms into Pururavas during the process of painting Urvasi-Pururavas. There is also a parallel track on chapters of Ravi Varma’s life, his association with the muse and so on.”

Debutante Karthika, daughter of yesteryear actor Radha, plays the muse. While Madhu Ambat gets the prerogative to capture Santosh’s histionics on camera, Pattanam Rasheed and S.B. Satheesan work on the make-up and costumes respectively.

“I took this up also because I was comfortable with the crew. I have worked with them before and know what their sensibilities are. Same with Lenin, he has made period stuff before and his intentions are pretty clear this time as well,” points out the director of photography (DoP), who has just packed up after a 90-day hectic schedule of Mani Ratnam’s ‘Raavan.’

‘“Raavan’ is a big film in terms of scale. Shooting it was an experience in itself. The terrain, the sets erected, the shooting arrangements – everything had challenges associated with it. Imagine a 90-feet long bridge across a river that is 250 feet below the bridge. To reach there you need four to five industrial cranes connected by cables through which the actors walk.

And you have action sequences to be shot there with five cameras. Lighting obviously, becomes a huge task in these kind of situations. It is also a bi-lingual film where you shoot the same sequences in two different languages, as two different takes. Lighting consistency, especially while filming in magic hours, was a tough bet,” he explains.

‘Raavan,’ a modern drama on the epic Ramayana, marking the celebrated director-DoP’s association for the fifth time, is now in the post-production stage. Santosh worked with Mani Ratnam in films such as ‘Thalapathi,’ ‘Roja,’ ‘Iruvar’ and ‘Dil Se.’

“It is a pleasure to work with Mani as he strives for versatality and perfection. Two of my national awards were for his films. The only trouble these days is that I cannot devote the kind of time a Mani Ratnam flick demands as I am into my production,” rues Santosh.

He is currently making a film based on a victim of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka. Titled ‘Ceylon,’ the film is being made in four languages, including Malayalam.

“It is about an autistic refugee caught in the web of ethnic issues. Being autistic, he does not know who is right and who is wrong. I wanted to show the state of children who are exposed to high levels of aggression from a tender age. By the time they are 23 or 24, they experience a whole gamut of emotions,” opines Santosh who is filming the story in the coastal belt of Maharastra.

“I wanted to avoid operational difficulties, hence the decision not to shoot in Sri Lanka. The film is shot in abstraction; contrary to the documentary mode adapted for this kind of narratives. I want to do it like a painting. So there are no conventional close-up type shots in the film. What ever facts a frame can accommodate, without being monotonous, would be done. The rest is lyrical.”

But for now it is the turn of Santosh Sivan, the actor, to face the arc lights.

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