Rani: My film is just not about box office glory

She began with a bang with 'Raja Ki Aayegi' in 1996, playing the Goddess Durga incarnate against a greedy husband and in-laws to match. Since then, Rani Mukerji has made giant strides as actor and star, excelling in movies like Yuva, Veer-Zaara, Paheli, Black, No One Killed Jessica, the Mardaani franchise and Hichki. Now married to filmmaker Aditya Chopra, Rani is also mother to little Adira.

It is with this background that we now see Rani enact the role of a wounded tigress, this time a mother of two kids, in her latest film, Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway. This is the first film Rani has done outside her home banner a decade after Bombay Talkies.

As she puts it, “This is the answer to all those who think that now I am doing only films produced by my husband! If he can work with other actors, why can’t I work with other filmmakers?”

Rani is her normal unassuming self as she goes on, “I received this offer from my friend (producer) Nikkhil Advani, who narrated a true incident that seemed so absurd. The gist was that a foreign country’s authorities had, so to speak, confiscated two small children from their Bengali parents, deeming them unfit for raising their kids. The charges were that they fed them with their hands, shared their bed with them, and applied a kaala teeka on them as all Indians do! Imagine that!”

Rani stresses, “Even an animal attacks if her kids are in any danger. So how would a mother feel? And we always take our moms for granted and never even thank them. After watching this film, I am sure all of us will call up our moms, or go give them a tight hug and kiss.”

Of course, it helped that the producers agreed to shoot with Rani at her convenience, as motherhood remains her own top priority now. The final clincher was that Rani knew her one-film-old director, Ashima Chibber, who was herself a single mother.

Rani met the real Mrs Sagarika Chatterjee only after the film was complete and the latter had watched the film. As she explains, “What I wanted to bring to the table was my interpretation of Mrs Chatterjee, and portray it cinematically more than as a real story that happened. I knew the emotions Sagarika went through as I had sat with Ashima a million times and gone through her tapes, grabbing her emotional graph—the frustration, anger, loneliness and mother’s love.”

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Rani decided, instead, to imagine that her mom Krishna Mukerji was the character she was portraying. “My mother had married my dad in Kolkata 50 years ago, when she was 21. She is a thoroughbred Bengali in the way she eats and talks, and whether she speaks in Hindi or English, she always does it in the way a Bengali would. She has done everything to us that Sagarika did, and if someone had taken my brother Raja and me away from her, she would have gone nuts.”

The role, Rani goes on, “hits you in the gut.” Says the actress, “It is a huge responsibility to feel that pain and loss and bring it out on screen. I could not have put myself in Sagarika’s place as I cannot even imagine Adira being taken away from me. I still haven't switched off from the film. Each time I watch the promo, I again think of all the parents separated from children for whatever reason. This film has a bigger purpose. We need to create awareness among the people with the right power. Even today, these things are happening to people of other nationalities as well. So it’s not just about the box-office.”