VIKRAMADITYA MOTWANE: THE ANATOMY OF A LOVE STORY

With Lootera—his gorgeous and atmospheric 2018 period saga centred around love, betrayal, and redemption—re-releasing at the theatres this March, we caught up with the ace filmmaker to talk about his quaint slow-burn love story bereft of Bollywood trappings, and discuss the future of Bollywood romances

- By Ananya Ghosh

It seems, Motwane and I do not agree on how we view a movie—in the last interview, he had refused to buy my take on CTRI essentially being a love story, and this time when he terms The Last Leaf, his inspiration for his 2013 movie Lootera, as a love story I am not convinced. To me the O. Henry short is about selflessness and the healing power of hope as well as art. It is a story that questions the popular idea of a 'a masterpiece'—a tag reserved for expensive but cold pieces of art peering from museum wall.

But, what he, along with screenwriter Bhavani Iyer, created out of the O. Henry short, is definitely one of my favourite love stories of all-time.

Johnsey, suffering from pneumonia, is convinced that she will die the day the last leaf of the nearly-bare vine outside her window falls. To her surprise, the one last leaf of the ivy survives rain and storm and stays put. It becomes a symbol of resilience and inspires Johnsey to find her zeal to live. As she gets better Behrman, her old cantankerous neighbour, dies of the same ailment. It is then revealed that in an astonishingly selfless act of kindness, he had gone out braving the rain and the snow and meticulously painted the 'last leaf' ensuring that Johnsey never sees the vine bare and caught pneumonia in the process.

Motwane reimagined this poignant climax of the 1907 short The Last Leaf, to create the heart-wrenching tragic end of his 2013 movie Lootera, which featured Sonakshi Sinha (Pakhi) and Ranveer Singh (Varun) as star-crossed lovers.

But the short story featuring three struggling artists living in New York's Greenwich Village, an overcrowded and impoverished neighbourhood, home to writers and artists trying to make ends meet while feverishly pursuing the dream of creating their own 'masterpiece' one day, has almost nothing in common with