It was reported earlier that Sharat Chandra has roped in South actress-filmmaker Revathi to direct the remake of Mahesh Bhatt’s path-breaking 1982 drama 'Arth', which had featured Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi as the leads. Incidentally, Revathi played one of the leads in the film’s 1993 Tamil remake, 'Marupadiyum', directed by the late Balu Mahendra, as the estranged wife who eventually chooses to live independently as a single mother to the daughter of her domestic help.
Shabana played the role in the original, bagging the National Award and a Filmfare Black Lady for her performance. Smita was equally impressive as the other woman, Kavita, who after breaking up Inder and Pooja’s marriage, is racked by guilt and insecurity and ends up breaking off the relationship. It has now learnt that the makers have approached Jacqueline Fernandez to reprise Smita’s role of a glamorous actress.
In an interview, the actress had admitted to taking acting classes in Los Angeles and wanting to get experimental with her roles. She’d shared that while she did not want to get away entirely from commercial cinema, as an actress, she did want to discover herself, do things a little differently, adding to the stuff she has done before. “Now, it’s all about balancing the two,” she had asserted, adding that since the last couple of years, she has been looking for scripts that will take her out of her comfort zone.
'Arth' is a semi-autobiographical film by Bhatt, delving into the filmmaker’s extra-marital affair with Parveen Babi with Kulbhushan as his screen alter ego. —Times of India
