Tillotama Shome: Striking the right chord

Saibal Chatterjee

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Two decades after debuting in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, the Golden Lion winner at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, Tillotama Shome’s acting career appears to have come full circle.

In her debut film, she had played a supporting role of a domestic help in a wealthy Delhi home. Her upcoming release, Sir, a nuanced, understated love story that premiered in Cannes Critics Week in 2018, has Shome in the lead as a live-in housemaid in the upscale Mumbai apartment of a real-estate tycoon’s son played by Vivek Gomber.

She delivers a measured, astoundingly impactful performance.“I’ve made a career out of playing people who are marginalised, under-represented and in the fringes of society,” she says. “I’m aware of my entitlement, of the opportunities that I’ve got in life. I, therefore, take the portrayal of such characters very seriously. I’m careful that it does not at any point come across as exploitative.”

Director Rohena Gera has taken nearly two years to secure a theatrical release for Sir, a film about a wealthy man who falls for his maid, who, on her part, is keenly aware of the distance that separates them despite the hours they spend in close proximity with each other. “The film is releasing after a real hard battle,” says the lead actress. “Kudos to Rohena that this is happening. She has been fighting for it for a long time.”

Sir is but a conventional love story. The screenplay walks a tightrope between a slyly provocative theme and a gently persuasive tone. The negotiation of the tricky relationship between two people from different social classes is delicate all through the film.When intimacy develops between the characters, it is handled with impressive sensitivity.

Says Shome: “I held on to Rohena’s brief that the character’s dignity would not be shaken off. Gomber and I were mindful not to let the exercise become voyeuristic, and to ensure that none of the gestures or gaze became exploitative.”

“What is cheeky about the film is the class dynamic,” she says. “It is a story of love across class in a country like India where a relationship, a friendship between a man and his maid is inevitably limited to pornography. The only way one can imagine it is in an exploitative set-up. I had to portray the female protagonist in a way that her sense of dignity is always maintained.”

Shome is all praise for co-actor Gomber (who produced and acted in 2015’s National Award-winning film, Court). “During the audition for the part, the other actors in the running were very ‘aware’ of the act of being nice to someone. I did not sense that from Gomber. From him, it wasn’t a grand gesture of kindness or egalitarianism. It was just instinct.”

Sir is a subtle yet pointed commentary on the deep class schisms in Indian society. How does Shome expect the Indian audience to react to the film? “I am curious to see what the response is. Whether people like the film or not, their reaction will be telling,” she says.

Shome got the Sir script when she was shooting for Konkona Sen Sharma’s A Death in the Gunj. She says: “Once I started reading it, I was very curious where Rohena was going to take this. It is something that could have gone completely wrong. It couldn’t have been the film it is but for the way Vivek Gomber plays his character.”

Sir hits the screens a week after the Irrfan Khan-starrer Angrezi Medium, which has Shome in a cameo that is a follow-up to her role in Hindi Medium. She is also a part of the cast of Mentalhood, an Alt Balaji web series that marks the digital debut of Karishma Kapoor. The sudden spate of releases is unusual Shome, whose career has evolved at its own pace.

“It’s not that mainstream projects have come to me and I’ve said no,” she says. “I don’t want to be a flagbearer of independent cinema. I’ve done whatever has come to me if the part has been interesting enough.” When casting director Honey Trehan offered her a role in Hindi Medium role, she told her “please play a character who is rich for a change”.

When she is offered a film, says Shome, she does not think whether it is independent or commercial. “Monsoon Wedding was an extremely independent film but it was commercially very successful,” she says, emphasising the futility of trying to anticipate how a film will turn out.