Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Raima Sen has been in the film industry for 25 years. During this time, she went from playing innocent teenagers to femme fatales and even overzealous journalists. Yet, Raima remembers when exactly it turned around for her – the moment that helped her carve her own identity, something beyond her illustrious last name.
Raima first faced camera when she was a teenager, playing Shabana Azmi’s daughter in the 1998 release Godmother. She recalls, “My first film was Godmother and I was 17 and I didn’t know anything about films or acting. I got to work with Vinay Shukla and Shabana Azmi and I didn’t know whether I wanted to do more films after that. I had been a fan of Shabana ji forever and to work with her was so scary. So after Godmother, I thought maybe I don’t want to be an actress because I had no clue. But then I just went with the flow.”
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Raima is the granddaughter of the great Suchitra Sen, arguably the most revered actress in Bengali cinema history. Her mother Moon Moon Sen and sister Riya are also actresses who have attained fame and success. So it was no wonder that a young Raima was routinely called ‘Suchitra’s granddaughter’ or ‘Moon Moon’s daughter’. But the 2003 release Chokher Bali changed that.
Talking about the impact of the film, Raima says, “Before it, I had done a lot of films like Godmother, Daman, and others. But I hadn’t seen the kind of recognition, critical acclaim, and offers that I started to get after Chokher Bali. Before it, I was just Suchitra Sen’s granddaughter and Moon Moon Sen’s daughter. That’s all I was. Whatever I did was not good enough. I was so young and I didn’t understand all that.”
Directed by the late Rituparno Ghosh, Chokher Bali starred Aishwarya Rai and Prosenjit Chatterjee. The film was received universal acclaim with praise for the performances of the two lead actresses – Raima and Aishwarya. And while the latter was already a huge star, for Raima, it proved to be her breakthrough. “After Chokher Bali, I became Raima Sen. That was the turning point in my life,” she recalls fondly.
