Shubho Mahurat (2003)

The narrative of the film Shubho Mahurat (2002) goes like this: an NRI Bengali star actress of yesteryears Padmini Chowdhury (Sharmila Tagore) comes to Kolkata apparently to produce a film to be directed by her second husband Sambit Roy (Sumantra Mukherjee). She makes it a point to rope in a close co-actress and friend Kakoli (Kalyani Mandal) for the lead role. Kakoli dies on the first day of the shoot under mysterious circumstances while she was being interviewed by a film journalist Mallika (Nandita Das). Her death is soon followed by the surprising and mysterious death of a female makeup artist. Then a police inspector (Tota Roychowdhury), Mallika and her Rangapisi/aunt (Rakhee Gulzar) investigate the matter to find that Padmini came to take revenge on Kakoli who had inadvertently caused harm to her during her pregnancy resulting in the birth of a spastic child and his early death. Padmini, after having confessed to the crime to Rangapisi who has been a fan of her, commits suicide.<br/><br/>Director Rituparno Ghosh says: I wanted to make a whole detective series with Ranga Pishima (Rakhee’s character in Shubho Mahurat)! It’s very difficult to make a non-judgemental crime story, which is what I tried to do with Shubho Mahurat. Grey characters, no police intervention, nothing: the detective knows who’s committed the crime, but she does nothing. I deliberately had women as both criminal and detective, because they’re inherently more tolerant. In an ordinary detective story, it is the hunter and the hunted – there’s no relationship between them except of wit.<br/><br/><a href="http://trishagupta.blogspot.in/2008/09/rituparno-ghosh-interview.html">http://trishagupta.blogspot.in/2008/09/rituparno-ghosh-interview.html</a>