Why Amol Palekar slapped Smita Patil on the film set?

Veteran actor-director Amol Palekar recalled the slap scene from his award-winning film ‘Bhumika’ and revealed that his co-star, late Smita Patil had not given her consent for it.

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In a new interview with an Indian media outlet, cinema veteran Amol Palekar looked back at his difficult slap scene with the late Smita Patil, from filmmaker Shyam Benegal’s National Award-winning title ‘Bhumika’.

“Shyam Benegal told me that I have to slap her (Smita Patil) without telling her. So I said, ‘No, I can’t do that’. I refuse to do anything that is not rehearsed. Your co-actor should know what you are going to do. Doing anything without their knowledge, according to me, is wrong and hence I don’t do it,” Palekar recalled, adding that he was ‘shattered’ to raise his hand on a woman, which he had never done before in his life.

However, despite his apprehension, the veteran shared that he had to go ahead with the seasoned filmmaker’s ‘order’ to slap Patil, without informing her about it or rehearsing the sequence with her in advance.

“The shot started and Smita started acting, so at one point I held her hand and slapped her,” he remembered. “The way Smita’s expression changed, she couldn’t believe that I just slapped her, she was aghast. She felt humiliated and angry… the camera kept rolling, it didn’t cut. The camera was capturing all her expressions. Not just the camera, even I was just staring at her, I forgot everything else.”

“Looking at her facial expressions I was feeling very uneasy. I didn’t know how to react,” Palekar revealed, adding that the incident brought the two closer as co-stars, as he later broke down and profusely apologised to Patil.

“I went to Smita, hugged and said sorry to her. Both of us broke down,” he concluded.

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Notably, Palekar and Patil led ‘Bhumika’ (1977) was loosely based on the Marathi-language memoir, ‘Sangtye Aika’, of prominent Marathi actor of the ’40s, Hansa Wadkar. The title bagged two National Film Awards, Best Actress for Patil, and Best Screenplay, shared by Benegal with Satyadev Dubey and Girish Karnad.