Director: Rituparno Ghosh; Writer: Sudeshna Bandyopadhyay, Agatha Christie, Debabrata Dutta, Rituparno Ghosh; Producer: Bishu Chakraborty, Indra Kumar Ghosh, Shoubhik Mitra; Cinematographer: Aveek Mukhopadhyay; Editor: Arghakamal Mitra; Cast: Sharmila Tagore, Nandita Das, Kalyani Mandal, Moumita Gupta, Aparajita Adhya, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Anindya Chatterjee, Rajesh Sharma, Kaushik Banerjee, Jishu Sengupta, Dibya Bhattacharya, Sumanta Mukherjee, Rakhee Gulzar, Saket Bandyopadhyay, Satrajit Bandyopadhyay, Urmila Bhowmick, Abhijit Brahmachari, Sumit Chakraborty, Sumitra Chakraborty, Arindam Chatterjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Barun Das, Atanu Deb, Mithu Debi, Goutam Ghose, Subhra Ghosh, Abhijit Guha, Kameshwar Mishra, Shakuntala Mondal, Madhabi Mukherjee, Tabun Munshi, Sudip Pal, Dilip Patra, Ujjwal Pramanik, Hari Singh, Joginder Singh
Duration: 02:43:28; Aspect Ratio: 1.667:1; Hue: 87.244; Saturation: 0.055; Lightness: 0.289; Volume: 0.127; Cuts per Minute: 7.805
Summary: 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.
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.
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