There’s something unreal about the setting: a sparsely furnished room, basic seating arrangements, posters of two iconic films – Taxi Driver and Scarface – loom over you from the walls, ‘Mere desh ki dharti’ and ‘Aye meray watan ke logon’ blare from loudspeakers in the vicinity (it’s 26 January) while a sixty-four-year-old film-maker talks about ‘finally’ making a film about love.

As Anjan Dutt readies for the release of his new film Finally Bhalobasha, the first question that occurs to me is why ‘finally’. “Well, I have never seriously dealt with love. Since I ventured into direction, I’ve been trying to work with issues that belong to my surroundings – broken families, my city, the crisis of the middle class, changing values, the global Bengali, at the same time incorporating the marginalized Bengali, not the typical Hindu Kolkata, the new-age youth, Christians, Bengalis but outsiders, with music of course playing an important role. So, that has been my forte rather than dealing with love per se.”

Like quite a few films of late in Bengali, Dutt’s too makes use of the multiple-story format. What makes it different, he says, is that all three stories deal with “tabooed love”. “I am aware that other films have dealt with each of these aspects, but I have infused each with a darkness that is uniquely mine. I don’t want to make it sentimental. While writing this I have faced certain uncomfortable questions about my life. For example, tomorrow if Neel (his son) comes and tells me that he wants to hang around with a man, even as a thinking, ‘radical’ individual, I would take time to accept that… or if today I am attracted to a young woman, I will not be able to face my wife, or if I had a daughter who tells me she wants to move in with a man in his mid-sixties, I will have problems”….Click here to read the full story