Kochi: It is Sunday, two days after the release of Bangalore Days and at 8’o clock in the morning, all Anjali Menon wants is to sleep for 48 hours. After all that tension and hard work, she is now numb.
Two days earlier, at the Padma Theatre in Ernakulam, a shy Anjali watched her film with friends, and ran away before the end credits rolled up the screen.
She has once stood outside another theatre in Thiruvananthapuram, nearly six years ago on a December day, smiling, shaking hands with the few who come to tell her about Manjadikuru, her first feature film, screened at a film festival. Anjali never left its side, her first movie, for several years, until it got a theatre release in 2012. While she waited, she directed a segment called Happy Journey in Kerala Cafe, and wrote a script called Ustad Hotel for Anwar Rasheed.
Then in an editing studio in Chennai, during the post production of Manjadikuru, Anjali thought of her second feature film. To her assistant Abhilash Francis, she asked suddenly, “What about a film about cousins?” And then she made Bangalore Days.
Where did Bengaluru come from? “Bengaluru stands for something every Malayali dreams of — liberation and aspirations. It is like they get a licence to dream. And it is only an overnight journey from Kerala,” says Anjali, remembering her college days, the days she would visit her brother there. She has put a bit of her dreams and aspirations into her characters, ‘the cousins’ she speaks of so fondly — Nazriya, Dulquer and Nivin.
“There would be a scene with them on a car, and I would be on a car behind them, directing with a walkie-talkie. But these three would make me laugh so much, play songs for me in their car. Dulquer is a fast driver and Nivin would just laugh so much that we would say, let’s wait till Nivin finishes laughing. And Nazriya is such a spontaneous actor, she would be all bubbly on the sets but the minute you say action, she just transforms into the character while the rest of us still stay distracted! It was just crazy and all 75 days of the film’s shoot were so full of energy.”
Like in Manjadikuru, where her childhood memories helped her write, in Bangalore Days, Anjali wrote into her script, a few pieces from her adult life.
“Like the balcony scene where Nazriya is locked out. It happened to me when we moved to Bombay, I was stuck in the balcony with my phone inside, and my neighbours helped me out,” she says between little spurts of laughter. For her too, it’s always been groups of three — friends and relatives in school and college.
“Three seem to have a magic like that. These three in the film are like an ideal family, they accept and allow each other to grow. Divya, Kuttan and Arjun choose the family that understands them. These are people who are all around us. Don’t we all know guys like that?” It is only Sarah’s character that’s been inspired by a real life character she saw once, in a wheel chair.
“She has the most beautiful smile I have seen.” Parvathi became her Sarah, Fahadh her Das and Nithya her Natasha.
As her film is packing nearly 80 theatres in the state and more than 100 outside, Anjali goes back to her baby, to her bleary-eyed days and sleepless nights, and writes on her blog ‘Did you know that babies smell like they’re made in a bakery?’
