Dibyojyoti Baksi/IANS
Mumbai, Feb 14: Actress Tannishtha Chatterjee has not only sung in Dev Benegal's forthcoming film "Road, Movie" but also composed a song inspired by Rajasthani construction workers.
"I have sung in my films before, but this was some kind of special thing. It wasn't meant to be...it wasn't there in the script as I remember. There was a dance and I was dancing on it but since Dev knew me from my girl band (days), he asked me to sing," Tannishtha said after the first look of "Road, Movie" here.
"The best part of it is I didn't record the song and lip-synced in front of the camera. I sang the song live while shooting for that sequence," she said.
Tannishtha, who earned international acclaim with "Brick Lane", says she was able to compose the song borrowing tunes from some Rajasthani folk music she had heard in her childhood that still lingers in her mind.
"When I was a child I used to hear these songs sung by Rajasthani construction workers and the tunes kind of stayed in my mind...as a child you can't really ignore what they are singing. The tune, over the years, also changes; so I started improvising and I made many changes," the actress said.
"Road, Movie" revolves around Vishnu (Abhay Deol), a young man desperate to escape a future working as a salesman for his father's hair oil business.
He relishes the chance to drive his uncle's 1940s Chevy truck across the desert to a museum. Along the way, the cast of characters grows to include a cheeky sidekick in the form of a runaway boy (Mohammed Faizal), a wise mentor in an old desert wanderer, Om (Satish Kaushik), and a beautiful gypsy woman (Tannishtha).
Vishnu soon learns that the truck was once a travelling cinema, a reflection of the director's own past working with a touring cinema in India. The truck still contains projection equipment and reels of film from vintage Indian cinema to the daredevil silent comedies of Hollywood. Screening films in the middle of the desert provides them all with moments of salvation and reflection.
Throwing light on her role in this film, Tannishtha said: "It's a role of a gypsy woman and Dev was very specific that he doesn't want a region-specific gypsy; he wants a generic gypsy so that everyone from Arizona to Jaisalmer could identify with her. He wanted to have a generic quality of a wanderer, which means she has a mystery in her...she comes from nowhere and she vanishes nowhere."
Releasing in India March 5, the film has already garnered huge appreciation at the Toronto Film Festival.
Tannishtha has just finished shooting a Hollywood film directed by actress Lucy Liu and she is doing a Hindi film too.
"I have just finished shooting a Hollywood film by Lucy Liu. It's based on a book, 'Half The Sky'. I'm doing another Hindi film about which I will be able to talk in another couple of weeks," she said.