Tillotama Shome: The other actress

Tillotama says being an outsider has freed her craft, as she reviews the success of her film Sir in France and this year’s challenges

January 18, 2019 03:17 pm | Updated January 19, 2019 04:00 pm IST

Tillotama Shome

Tillotama Shome

At first glance there’s something enviably serene and strikingly hushed about Tillotama Shome. As I settle down to interview her on one of the many bean bags scattered in the basement library of her brother Utsa Shome’s popular Leaping Windows café in Versova, I ask her how she manages to stay within and yet so removed from the frenzy and noise of Mumbai, the film industry in particular.

“I guess I have some instinct for the counter,” she says. Today, that contrarian in her is finding mainstream success internationally. Her latest film, Rohena Gera’s Sir (titled Monsieur in French), which played in the Critics’ Week at Cannes last year, has been faring very well at the French box office, already among five all-time best Indian films there, the others being Salaam Bombay, Jalsaghar, The Lunchbox and Parched. It opened with ₹4.5 crore in the first week and has amassed ₹9.2 crore in less than three weeks, with the screen count going up to 100 from the initial 85. The cherry on the cake: the best actress award that she recently won at the International Film Festival of Belgium.

More of significance has happened to Tillotama in the last few years. She broke away from the art house tag to star in a film like Hindi Medium. She was also able to move away from the intense, rural characters that she is often bracketed in, to play the bright and happy Bonnie Bakshi in A Deathin the Gunj.

A still from 'Sir'

A still from 'Sir'

We meet her when she is fresh from being on the jury at the International Film Festival and Award Macao, surrounded by major filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Danis Tanovic as fellow jury members and being blown away by the work of young filmmakers. “There is no time to rest on anything you have done because if this is the kind of work a first-time filmmaker is coming up with, then you’ll have to start from zero,” she says. She is particularly in the grips of Eva Trobisch’s German graduation film All’s Good, and how its protagonist copes with a violent, violating situation.

“There is a deep recognition for the need for change where there is equity,” she says, but admits encountering a sense of paralysis and fatigue with anger, of searching for words to articulate what she feels about things in the post #MeToo context. “One needs to find a new way of challenging status quo, with surety but gentleness. I will arrive at my rebellion and revolution through the work I am doing,” she says.

When patience pays

For someone regarded highly as an actor now, childhood and school were all about not being good at anything. “Handwriting is not good, can’t sing, can’t dance, not the best in class, not at all good in sports. Hardworking, earnest, can do better,” she reels off. There was a sense of mediocrity when all you would have wanted was to excel. “[But] I am very proud of these qualities because to be an actor you have to be really patient. It’s a quality well learnt,” she smiles.

The journey into acting started with theatre. Piyush Mishra had done a one-woman show, Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon , which influenced her a lot. She had also just started practising Buddhism. “So if the idea of self is ever expansive than a fixed one, I wanted to see if I could also write a new story for myself,” she says. Years later she still looks at opting for acting an “act of defiance”, given the kind of work she does, which doesn’t get mainstream theatrical release or appreciation. “Why do I still want to do it? In finding the answer to that I’m still at it,” says Tillotama. A significant by-product of theatre was that it helped her speech disorder fade away. “The dark stage became a second birth of sorts,” she says.

The actress at Cannes Critics' Week premiere of 'Sir' last year

The actress at Cannes Critics' Week premiere of 'Sir' last year

The actor believes that when there is something you really want to do, even if you are not good at it, you will take the risk to discover things about yourself. Qissa made her overcome her fear of water and learn swimming. And in the feature film, Chintu Ka Birthday, she learnt how to sing. Looking back, it feels as though the stammer and lack of confidence, not knowing how to swim or sing, were myths, now vanished. “There are newer challenges, new monsters to battle,” she smiles.

Perks of being an outsider

Our stream of consciousness conversation flows back to the past, when an Inlaks scholarship took her for further studies to the US. This was immediately after having done Monsoon Wedding and Shadows of Time, and she remembers Naseeruddin Shah calling her decision “career suicide”.

Red carpet ready
  • “It’s fun to dress up for a Cannes or when it happens once in a while because then it feels like I’m playing the part of a really well-dressed person,” says Tillotama. But if she had to do hair, make-up, heels and fancy clothes every day, she’d hate it. “Make it fun and make it you” is her style mantra. So, for the première of Sir at Cannes, she wore a simple Abu Sandeep sari, with bows on the pallu. She prefers designers who have a sense of style that is relaxed and sensible, and an aesthetic that she finds exciting. Her favourites include Payal Khandwala (“she has a great sense of colour and a Japanese, minimalist aesthetic”), Eka, Bodice, Urvashi Kaur, Pero and Sanjay Garg’s Raw Mango.

“There is an instinct to keep learning that keeps me from getting bored,” she says, on taking a long break from acting right at the start of her film career. The “transformational force” that theatre had proved to be in her life prompted her to do her masters in drama therapy in New York University. She later worked with Creative Arts, doing therapy work with inmates in the high security Rikers Island prison complex. The improvisational work taught her more than any acting school could have. It toughened her and made her resilient. She remembers the diversity of stories and grey narratives thrown at her every day, the constant exposure to the frailty of human beings.

After four-and-a-half years in the US, she decided to return to Mumbai — just when she had got an O1 visa and a fully-paid PhD programme in the University of Michigan. She was missing home, and the work with the inmates had been emotionally draining and physically exhausting. “I’ve quit things when they got really good for me. I really don’t know what my path ahead is, but I do know I have a path,” she says.

Films have come to her, on their own. She chooses based on the director and if the script offers her a part she hasn’t done before. She feels she can’t question her journey. There have been times when she has felt low about not getting enough work from Mumbai filmmakers; there is a list of directors whom she wants to work with but hasn’t yet. “Either I can cry about it, about being an outsider, or I can celebrate this unique journey; these films which come from nowhere and find me in my little apartment from miles afar and gift me this opportunity to play something I haven’t before without being overly concerned about how famous I am, what my commercial value is. Hopefully with this work I will seduce those people who have rejected me,” she says.

Tillotama Shome

Tillotama Shome

Tillotama also feels that she has come to terms with being on the fringes. It’s not a dramatic sense of being in exile, but one that allows you a certain freedom away from the market pressures. “It allows you to observe and grow in a different way,” she adds.

Mentors
  • Mira Nair: “She made me understand in my first film (Monsoon Wedding) and it has stuck with me — of being 100% present and honest in a moment. The camera catches it.”
  • Anup Singh: “Working with him (in Qissa and The Song of Scorpions) I realised it’s not important to get every take right. The idea we have so many takes is so we can play in each of them.”
  • Dibakar Banerjee: “I thought I’d try (Shanghai) my way. Then he told me the character’s back story. I did what he wanted, but it was filled up with the force of this character he’d described.”

Going the distance

She has a lot to keep her busy other than films — reading a book at home, cooking something new, going for a swim or a walk. There are many things she needs to do in order to feel a sense of excitement and they often don’t involve other people. “You are part of creating content, consuming content. I go through phases of absolute revulsion to watching anything on TV,” she says.

There is also an intensity of experiencing life in Mumbai that she likes. She wants to live off the city’s energy and yet stay away, find ways of ejecting herself out of it, to be in her “island of books and friends”.

Books take her on a vital journey to places outside her own world. In between working on films, she challenges herself with targets like reading 300 pages a day. “Then it becomes like a love affair. If you do something else it feels as though you are cheating on the one thing you have committed to.”

Her strongest belief is in what the Romantics (of English literature) called “negative capability” — foregoing routine and desire for certainty. The motto is to keep reinventing, she believes. In the aftermath of Sir, she felt it was time to “rebuild, requestion, dig deeper and expose myself to many stories”. So she hardly worked most of last year, other than in Gautam Ghosh’s new film with Adil Hussain and Neeraj Kabi. “By the time he offered it I was raring to go. It was like the old skin had come off to expose new skin,” she says. Tillotama is now looking forward to begin on the new films of Madhuja Mukherjee, Anup Singh and Rima Das this year, with the same spirit of recreating herself. “It’s a marathon being an actor; it’s not a short sprint.” And she is here for the long distance run.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.