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Unsaid, not unheard

Vikram Bhatt says his film "Ankahee" is nothing but the truth. That doesn't mean he is revealing names, though, finds RANA SIDDIQUI

IF TRUTH BE TOLD Esha Deol and Aftab Shivdasani in Vikram Bhatt's "Ankahee" released this Friday

Art is catharsis, they say, sometimes at your own cost and sometimes at others. And if sources are to be believed, the film Ankahee by Vikram Bhatt is his catharsis. But at his own cost as well as former Miss Universe Sushmita Sen.

For him, the cost is speaking his heart out for her. For Sen, his ex-beloved, as the reports go, the cost is putting her relationship with him to public scrutiny. The film is said to be loosely based on their relationship in the early phase of Sen's life after she became Miss Universe.

Bhatt, the maker of superhits like Raaz and Ghulam and more recently, some failures as the multi-starrer Elaan, which gave Mithun Chakravarty a second innings in mainstream Hindi films, admitted as much in an earlier interview with The Hindu. "It is about that phase of my life when we were in a beautiful relationship. I have completely laid bare my heart in it. It is an honest film. It is in a way my catharsis."

Now the filmmaker says, "These are wrong media reports. I have been denying it constantly. It is not based on my association with her. I have no right to make a film on Sushmita. It is just a film on an extra-martial relationship. It is about me and a relationship I was once in. It is completely fiction. And all characters in this film are fictional."

Nonetheless, the film is an expression of his self. This is one statement Bhatt doesn't go back on.

Family tale

All said and done, the film that stars Esha Deol, Aftab Shivdasani and Amisha Patel is about a doctor played by Aftab who is happily married and has a daughter. The tranquillity of his life is disturbed as the winner of the Miss World title, played by Esha Deol, drops in at his clinic as a patient of manic depression. He helps her as a physician as also on humanitarian grounds. But the situation affects his family front when she holds on to him gradually for emotional support too. She becomes obsessed with him. And he also falls in love with her.

Amisha Patel plays Aftab's wife in the film. "It is about that depression, that isolation, that euphoria that I underwent during that phase of my life. It is hence, based on a period of my life. How an extra-martial affair can happen even in the face of happy married life is what the film deals with. It also tells you that it is human to fall in love more than once in your life. One doesn't want to come out of a relationship of love, but one has to, for the sake of some earlier commitments. It is a true film. I have completely unmasked myself in it. I haven't manipulated even a single moment in it."

One may ask, didn't he feel scared unmasking himself and putting a question mark on someone's image? "Why should I? There is nothing wrong in telling the truth, about being honest. It is not about a rage, not about any anger with an establishment. It is just what I felt during that course of my life," asserts this son of cinematographer Pravin Bhatt.

Importantly, Bhatt wanted to make this film some time back. But things didn't fall in line. He was also going to use other actors. "That was some time back. I was taking Sanjay Suri and Rituparna Sengupta as my lead pair. But then, the producer (he refuses to name the person) was different. After Pritish Nandy decided to produce the film, I changed the cast too. I started the film last August and it is complete within nine months," he beams.

There is more. The film that has three songs plays out as a flashback in which a father is telling his 16-year-old daughter the tale of his past.

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