A plain life does not, generally, make an interesting biopic. This medium of the arts comprises movies and some other audio-visual media. Flat life-stories do not result in appealing biographies either, in spite of the contributions made by the persons concerned to their respective fields. There have been a few among the greats whose life-stories were later acclaimed as engrossing reads. Thus a biography or biopic on Christopher Columbus or Ibn Battuta, Asoka or Alexander the Great or Rasputin captivates people today as they did in the past. People dealing with these eventful lives normally ensure that movies or publications on them enjoy a great feedback. It cannot necessarily be said about many a great scientist, philosopher, an author or even a legendary traveller.
Richard Attenborough's epic movie 'Gandhi' has carved a place for itself among the great biopic productions in the modern times. Few thought about Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-winning poet, despite his stellar position in both South Asian and continental literatures. It may have been due to the poet's mostly sedentary life, confined to his idyllic Shantiniketan, after he reached middle age. However, the poet's life had also been filled with his own traumatic moments and drama. Moreover, he was an avid traveller, making trips to a vast number of countries, and almost every corner of the greater Bengal. His position of being the member of a zemindar family took him to the villages in East Bengal for supervision of the subjects and collection of taxes. Tagore used a boat-cum-residence to move around the villages on the banks of the Padma and other rivers. His river travels took him to the midst of pristine nature comprising vast water bodies laced by lush green villages. This visual treasure that defined Tagore's early and late-youth could not create much appeal to the movie makers. Had they been moved by the saga of the poet's river trips, they could make a memorable biopic on him long ago. They appeared to have felt discouraged at the lack of dramatic elements in the poet's life.
Surprisingly, a number of movies have been made on Tagore's short stories and novels. But when it came to a biopic, even a life-long admirer like Satyajit Ray did not give much thought to the idea. Instead, he made a short film on the poet which is considered a masterpiece. Biographies of Tagore are mostly academic, leaving little breathing space for the general readers. On the other hand, the two decades' active life of Kazi Nazrul Islam appears to be filled with continuous ups and downs, traumas, tragedies, romance and dramatic moments. These unique biographical elements have not yet prompted a movie maker to make a full-length biopic on Nazrul.
Against this backdrop, the news of making a biopic on Poet Jibanananda Das comes as a great surprise to even his blind fans. The reactions to the news are mixed. A section of admirers of the poet believes that the reclusive and self-absorbed life that the poet has led in his less than 3-decade-long poetic career may offer an in-depth glimpse into his creative process; but it lacks the elements needed for a biopic worth enjoying. Jibanananda Das had a plain, hermit's life with his activities limited to writing and teaching at colleges only. Few jolts of reality shook him noticeably. Outwardly a poet hypnotised by nature, the mundane life affected him and his poetry at the subterranean creative level. Unlike Tagore and Nazrul, this great modernist poet was gifted with a unique reflex. The majesty and decadence of civilisations, the destructions and human tragedies wrought by the 2nd World War and the sense of alienation drove him to sink in his seemingly bottomless abyss of his own. The poet bled, and endured alone the assaults, both worldly and transcendental. The general perception of Jibanananda was that of a nature-struck poet. Due to his dread for limelight, his reputation remained limited to a small circle comprising contemporaries and admiring readers. Thanks to this it took two long decades after an unnatural death for the poet to appear before the greater segments of poetry lovers with his multi-faceted genius. By the 1980s, Jibanananda Das emerged as a major poet full of creative vibrancy as well as the awareness of his time. The poet did not have any dearth of drama in his life. To the enigma of his readers, those remained buried in his poetic visions.
A biopic maker looks for dramatic and visually rich elements in the life he intends to work on. Disappointingly, Jibanananda appears to be poor on this count. The Kolkata movie director Sayantan Mukherjee is fully aware of this shortcoming. As a way out he turns to the drama-filled inner self of the poet, in which Jibanananda eventually discovers himself to be mired. This chapter of the poet's not-too-long career presents itself in the form of his unhappy conjugal life, in which the lead role is played by Labonyo Das, the poet's wife. Mrs Das contributed massively to the making of this outstanding poet, in an oblique way though. With Labonyo Das desperately aspiring to be a movie heroine bothering little about her husband's poetry, and humiliating the poet at every opportunity, the only option Jibanananda had before him was withdrawal from family life. As years wore on, the poet continued to weave a cocoon around him. Torments, inflicted by Labonyo on the poet, are expected to be in a wide focus in the upcoming biopic. A number of poems by Jibanananda quite explicitly expose the poet's dark musings, especially his death wish. A number of his contemporaries, his younger admirers and the later critics have ascribed the his ordeal to Labonyo Das' ambitions and her growing apathy towards him. The poet's diaries stand infallible witness to his largely suppressed outbursts and anguishes. The would-be biopic maker has been reported to have planned to concentrate on Labonyo to such an extent that Jibanananda is going to be portrayed in the movie as viewed by his wife. He is set to be projected as a 'failed husband and father', a person fully detached from 'reality'. A large amount of sympathy of the non-critical viewers possibly awaits the biopic character of Labonyo. It has already started galling many.
Unlike biographies, biopic productions have been seen move away from fact putting pinches of fiction into real life characters. Blaming it on the medium's different form, many biopic directors have been seen basking in their freedom to change the basic make-up of the true characters. Even the portrayal of well-known characters is often found skewed in many cases. A lot of the otherwise highly praising viewers took exception to the way the politician Suhrawardy had been portrayed in Richard Attenborough's `Gandhi'. In fact, these lapses are said to creep into the productions telling about the event-filled times and legendary figures. Thus the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring biopic on the fascinating life of Howard Hughes, an iconic figure of the USA, appears to be a work filled with scores of details. The film `The Aviator' (2004), however, could not claim itself to be a fully authentic piece on Howard Hughes. The same applies to Mel Gibson's `Braveheart' (1995), a biopic on the medieval Scottish nationalist hero William Wallace. Due to its complicated style of story-telling, a section of critics have always suspected the realistic portrayal of the life of China's last Qing dynasty emperor Puyi in the film `The Last Emperor'. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1987, the film records the days of the child emperor in the turbulent China in the 1950s. It also narrates the quiet, humble life of the ex-emperor as a gardener during Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Biopic films using newsreels generally earn critical approval. Many directors working on pre-cinema age characters or those living centuries back draw heavily on written historical documents and archival objects. The 1928 silent-era movie `The Passion of Joan of Arc' depicting the tragic end of the indomitable French woman warrior stands out as an impeccably made biopic. Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln', showing the last four years in the life of the legendary US President Abraham Lincoln, also emerges as one of the brilliant biopic films in movie history. For documentary details on Lincoln, director Spielberg turned to the famous biography of the President by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
There are intermittent gaps in the history of biopic making. Many great persons have been sidestepped by gifted biopic directors.
