It is an even greater thrill to see the man put his nose to the grill and work with a reading list and bibliography in three languages that would put a PhD scholar to shame. And then it is all re-presented in an appropriately pithy, racy style—a serial story replete with repeats and overlaps to heighten the narrative engagement.
Padgaonkar, better known for his expert writing on French wine and cuisine (in between ‘saving the nation’, writing edits at the Times of India), turns his attention here to the overheated summer of 1957, when Roberto Rossellini, the presiding guru of reality cinema as well as of fulsome Latin romancing, lands in India—on invitation from Jawaharlal Nehru—to produce a clutch of forgettable documentaries as well an "embarrassing" and failed feature film, India Matri Bhumi. (Despite claims to the contrary by his acolytes, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, who found it a grand departure going against the grain of all previous cinema).
Carrying with him the excess baggage of a reputation as a ladies man—he used to boast of his systematic seduction of famous leading ladies like Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani and scores more to none less than M.F. Husain—Rossellini pretty soon gets embroiled in a steamy situation with Sonali, the wife of Indian filmmaker Harisadhan Dasgupta. The mother of two shifts into a room adjoining the famous director’s at the Taj, Mumbai, leaving the husband to fulminate publicly against this transgressive ‘immorality’.
All this provides immense glee and lurid story material for Baburao Patel of Filmindia and R.K. Karanjia of Blitz. For the next two years Blitz keeps up a tirade against Rossellini as the depraved and debauched Westerner who was devouring gullible Indian women and accuses him of running a "racket of extracurricular international philandering".
Patel is even more abusive. He takes Rossellini to the cleaners for imagining "that Bombay is an open city for seduction of married women" and wonders how "a man fortunate enough to be the husband of Ingrid Bergman" could have anything but polite interest in a "woman with a thin and silly piping voice". He goes on to berate Rossellini as "a wife-lifting Casanova" and Sonali for having brought "eternal shame" on her family and country.
Now all this is pretty thin and sleazy material, with nothing very illuminating or uplifting about it. It is hard to imagine a life for it outside the domain of the yellow press. It is fascinating, therefore, to see how the entire episode is deftly turned around by Padgaonkar to reflect on the debates around cinema and artistic freedom of the time, which led to the creation of the French ‘New Wave’. The story also sheds light on the accessibility and personal involvement of the then Indian Prime Minister in artists’ and artistic affairs, something unimaginable in our times.
But clearly Padgaonkar is under ‘his’ spell. He has little sympathy for Sonali or her husband or the various members of the cast who are less enamoured of the amorous filmmaker. "Creative" souls cannot be judged on the measuring scales of middle-class morality. If, for every new film he made, he needed a new woman in his life, so be it. No one seems to have warned the author that there is something dated and little more than ‘male’ about this view, reinforced in no small measure by Sonali’s backward consciousness, which believed that "the man is the undisputed head of the house and the first duty of the woman is to take care of him".
It’s a pity Sonali did not take notice of Anna Magnani’s warning, "Watch out! He’s a big, ignoble slut, an incredible son of a bitch. Kick him in the ass now and then."
Neither does Padgaonkar, who glosses over Rossellini’s eternal sexual prowling by claiming he was not responsible; "it was the women who fell for his charm and irresistible personality." Quite simply, so has Padgaonkar.
