The trailer for the late movie star Soumitra Chatterjee’s biopic Abhijaan (2021) offers a peek into director Parambrata Chatterjee’s effort to bring all aspects of the multi-faceted personality together in a compact cinematic journey.
Featuring the great actor himself, with Jisshu Sengupta portraying his younger self, Abhijaan stars a host of artistes, including Paoli Dam, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Basabdatta Chatterjee, Rudranil Ghosh and Qaushiq Mukherjee.
Parambrata has conceptualized the film with the veteran looking back at his career and important junctures in his life. In Abhijaan, Parambrata visits the illustrious artiste as an aspiring director. Claiming to be a "fan boy", he takes his permission to record their interactions so that one day he can make a film based on the information.
As Soumitra goes on narrating his story, the film offers visuals to those accounts from the past with Sengupta as Soumitra. The narration seems to be reflective to which the listener can add his own perspective and perceptions of Soumitra’s life, relationships, the wide range of his artistic personality as theatre artiste, poet and painter, and a thoroughly political person as Soumitra himself claims to be.
The most heart-wrenching as well as uncanny sequence of the trailer comes at the end, when the spirited actor confesses that he chose to tell his stories despite the initial reservations for fear that he might not live to tell those. Those last few scenes, with Soumitra's expressions speaking of his vulnerability and carrying the signs of years of a fight to live life to the fullest, also suggest that the man himself will steal the show from all the other artistes.
Watch the trailer below and let us know if you are keen to watch Abhijaan.