Sengupta would ask her what she did when she was sad, and weave it (eating chocolates) into the narrative he’d talk to the wall, practise a scene, before asking his actors to respond. Mitra as Ela in a still from Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s film Once Upon a Time in Calcutta He helps you explore yourself”, and would interject to “tone down” if a flip, a turn seemed “a little commercial”. “He makes everyone work hard and he works hard himself. Some scenes left Mitra “numb, wondering how come Aditya, being a man, could capture the nuances of how a woman feels in such a correct, bang-on way”, other scenes left her “panting for breath”, like the one in Khidirpur, where she goes with Raja (Shayak Roy), to go meet a local don, she was “fed-up with Aditya” for making her repeat-climb the stairs until he was satisfied. She’s extremely collaborative and patient, it’s been wonderful finding Ela with her,” he says. Later, “with every meeting and conversation, it was clear there were more parallels in the personalities. Mentally, for Sengupta, the collaboration started when they met at an event. Sengupta, who’d “been seeing Sreelekha’s films for a very long time” didn’t write Ela with anyone in mind. Ela is far more intelligent than me, not conniving but something in between…I would never do something which I think is amoral,” she says. I could feel Ela’s angst, pain, desperation, but due to that desperation things that Ela did Sreelekha would never do. A bit of Sreelekha rubbed onto Ela and a bit of Ela rubbed onto Sreelekha.

The parallels in Ela and Sreelekha are uncanny, such as a late-night TV astrology show Mitra had to do once, after going bankrupt post a Paris trip.

In lifting a defunct cabaret stage, with Mitra at the centre, Sengupta has given the actor, in her more-than-two-decade career, a role of a lifetime.

Once upon a time not long ago remix