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The
Sea Captain's Tale
This
is a film noir set in the Asian community in Gravesend.
Jetender
(Om Puri) is a wealthy money-lender and importer/exporter: an Asian
'Godfather' figure to his community.
He
goes into business with the young Pushpinder (Nitin Ganatra), who
falls in love with Jetender's beautiful and extravagant wife, Meena
(Indira Varma).
Meena
claims that Jetender is a tyrant who makes her life hell.
Pushpinder
and Meena begin a passionate affair and Pushpinder borrows money
for Meena from her husband.
Slowly,
though, Pushpinder starts to learn the truth about Meena and her
manipulative, lying ways.
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| Meena
is manipulative and uses deceit to get what she wants |
In
Indira's own words...
On
theatre:
"I love it because of the language. Stage plays tend to rely
more on the spoken word, and they're generally written with greater
care than TV. I've done a lot of work with Harold Pinter, both acting
with him and being directed by him, and it doesn't get any better
than that."
On
working with Om Puri: "Om Puri is a god. He's got
everything: a fantastic face, a fantastic voice and a great talent.
It's quite unnerving to work with him, because you spend all that
time rehearsing your lines and working out how you're going to say
them, then he delivers a line of dialogue that sounds so realistic
that you have no choice but to respond in the same way. Om's
also a big flirt, and so am I, so we got on like a house on fire.
I kept getting him to do his bed voice in my ear in between takes.
He just purrs!"
On
love scenes with Nitin Ganatra: "Fortunately, Nitin is
an old friend and so there was no awkwardness about doing sex scenes.
We just got on with it and had a laugh."
On
Meena in The Sea Captain's Tale: "Meena's
superficial, shallow and materialistic, but I like her. I
know she's not a particularly good woman, but she's got balls, which
makes her fun to play. She's
quite childish: she thinks she can have her cake and eat it too.
And in a sense she can, because she's very sexy and she has youth
and glamour on her side, so she gets away with a lot. But
that's the only power she's got. Apart from her sexuality, she's
totally dependent on men, particularly on her husband.
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| Meena
claims that Jetender is a tyrant who makes her life hell |
"And
she's in the grip of an addiction. She can't stop shopping, and
she gets herself into terrible debt as a result. She
becomes a prostitute basically, but in a very controlled way. She's
perfectly happy to use her body as a way of making money, and she
seems to enjoy the sex as well, but ultimately she adores her husband
and he adores her."
On
TV jobs: "As an Asian woman you tend to get the demure
shopkeeper, the serious doctor or the 'exotica' – the dirty Asian
girl who wants it, who's so repressed by her family that she's sex-mad.
They're such stereotypes and the plots are usually pretty clichéd
– arranged marriages and so on. This
is such a refreshing change – it's literate and intelligent."
>>>
Indira Varma is in The
Sea Captain's Tale on BBC ONE on Thursday 2 October at 9pm
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