The Sense of a Beginning

The Talented Young Filmmaker Looks All Set to Enter the Big League With His Crossover Films
 

- Prachi Bhuchar and Suhani Singh

It’s not every day that an Indian filmmaker gets to be at the helm of a British film. But there have been a few exceptions. Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994) catapulted him to international acclaim, and four years later, the Mr India filmmaker directed a biopic on Queen Elizabeth. Nineteen years later, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox made an impressive debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it also won an award. Four years later, he too finds himself in the international spotlight. Only he will have not one, but two releases in 2017.

Batra’s breakthrough year starts off with The Sense of an Ending. An adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker winning novel, the film’s key cast and crew is all British, save for the Mumbai-born and based Batra. Whether Batra, 37, experiences crossover success like Kapur did remains to be seen, but he has already impressed the international critics with his English-language debut, which just crossed the million-dollar mark in the US. Batra “does a subtle, nuanced job in dealing with the old folks’ unearthed primal issues”, wrote Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy, further recognising the filmmaker’s ability to move “the action along briskly and smoothly”. The New York Times noted that “the film maintains intrigue and emotional magnetism as its mystery unfolds”, only losing the momentum in the last quarter. Later in the year, streaming giant Netflix will release Batra’s second English feature, Our Souls at Night, which brings together Robert Redford and Jane Fonda after five decades. Also an adaptation, of Kent Haruf ’s novel, the film follows two lonely, widowed neighbours in Colorado.