Rituparna and Samodarshi

Kolkata, August 27 (Calcutta Tube): AAROHON is a 2010 Bengali film starring Rituparna Sengupta, Sandhya Roy, Soumitra Chatterjee and others directed by Pinaki Chowdhury. Enjoy the complete review of AAROHON at Calcutta Tube.

Review AAROHAN – WHO’S ASCENSION?

Cast and Crew:

• Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sandhya Roy, Rituparna Sengupta, Samadarshi Dutta, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Tulika Basu and Rajesh Sharma
• Banner: Tapashya Media Production,
• Executive Producer: Rani Banerjee
• Short story: Subrata Choudhury
• Script and direction: Pinaki Chaudhuri
• Music: Suparna Kanti Ghosh
• D.O.P.: Badal Sarkar
• Editing: Sharmistha Jha
• Sound Design: Tito
• Date of Release: 27.08.2010
• Rating: 4/10

Review of Bengali Movie Aarohon

Aarohan Rituparna Sengupta-Bengali Film

Aarohan translates to ‘ascension’. Biblically, it has its origins in Christ’s bodily ascension from earth to Heaven on the 40^th day of his crucifixion. In Pinaki Chaudhuri’s film, this term expands to tell the story of a man’s ability to rise above his blind faith in the truth of horoscope that has no basis in science. Chaudhuri’s films Sanghat (1998) and Ballygunge Court (2008) won the National Award for the Best Regional Film (Bengali). Aarohan has been selected by the forthcoming Montreal International Film Festival.

The story explores Suryashekhar’s complete disillusionment (Soumitra Chatterjee) with his blind belief in horoscopes. He took every step in life following his horoscope. The same man tears his horoscope and throws the bits away in the Ganges in Benares. He came to Benares with wife Mrinalini (Sandhya Roy) to spend his last days at Moksha Bhavan where dying people are given shelter for one month. If they do not die, they have to leave.

Vignettes of life and death come across through different characters. Two sons are angry because their ageing father refuses to die placing the family finances at stake. An old man keeps heaving all the time till he finally kicks the bucket. A kothewalli-turned-spiritual woman dies of cancer within four days. A dying widow dies of a heart attack when her rebellious daughter-in-law Kasturi (Rituparna Sengpta) tells her that the baby she is expecting has not been sired by the woman’s son, a gay. Suryashekar is a self-centred, arrogant dictator whose life revolves around making plans about his own death including performing the death ritual before his death. Neither his wife Mrinalini (Sandhya Roy)’s persuasions nor his NRO grandson Arijit’s (Shamadarshi Dutta) sound logic make him see sense. He goes back to Kolkata, defeating the prediction made by the horoscope. He takes the pregnant Kasturi along, who, discarded by her husband, is left on the ghats, not because he feels sorry for her but because she is expecting a child sired by his grandson! Is this his way of rising above his belief is caste? Sorry, but we are not buying.

Rituparna and Rajesh Sharma: Aarohon Bengali Film

Aarohan contains every ingredient of a masala film – as many coincidences you can gobble from the first scene where Suryashekhar is saved from an accident by his grandson to many others; too many songs that take away from the fluid flow of the narrative though they are very good; an incredible dream scene where Kasturi dances like a Hindi film heroine; her seduction of Arijit and subsequent pregnancy;  an ill-executed and cinematographed kotha dance shown in flashback; and finally, the hurriedly shot sequence of Suryashekhar’s only son’s death.

Chaudhuri liberally dips into too many language pockets that take away the Bengali identity of the film in terms of language.  There is the clipped English in a boring voice-over by N. Viswanathan that sounds straight out an FD tourism-promotion documentary; American twang used by Arijit much of the audience might not care for; Bhojpuri or some Bihari dialect mouthed by Kasturi; and Bengali. The acting is very good with special commendations to Rituparna for a layered performance in an unusual role minus the dubbing done by someone else, to Sandhya Roy for her controlled performance; to Samadarshi for his freshness and spontaneity and Tulika Basu for being so expressive. Siddhartha Chatterjee as the son ruins the show. The editing is poor; the cinematography is uneven – very good in the intimate scenes with aesthetic lighting but equally flat in the dream song sequence.

Aarohan falls far below what its strong storyline demands and was capable of providing in terms of dramatic and aesthetic potential.

by Shoma A. Chatterji

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Antim Swash Sundor

August 26, 2010 (CalcuttaTube): Antim Swash Sundor is a Bengali movie directed by Kris Alin with Subrat Dutta, Indrani Halder, Poran Bandopadhyay in lead roles. Read the film review at CalcuttaTube.

ANTIM SHWASH SUNDOR – REALLY?

Banner: Venus Creations

Story, Screenplay & Direction: Kris Allen

Production design and art: Gautam Basu

Editing: Arghya Kamal Mitra

Music: Purbayan Chatterjee

Cast: Subrat Dutta, Indrani Haldar, Paran Bandopadhyay, Kaushik BanerjeeKunal Padhy, Swagata Mukherjee, Baby Surangana and others

Date of Release: August 20 2010

Rating: 4/10

Magic realism seems to be the catchword of many contemporary Bengali films. Antim Shwash Sundar or Last Breath Beautiful is the latest example. For those who are avid readers, the ideology resembles W.W. Jacobs’ famous story The Monkey’s Paw where a man finds a magical monkey’s paw that will grant the finder three wishes to turn his life around. But the price will be heavier than the wishes when fulfilled. The film has a striking opening. A dead body of an apparently rich man washes up to the shores of a beach. Prem Sengupta (Subrat Dutta) moping on the beach, is sad about his wife Vibha (Indrani Haldar)’s unhappiness with their modest lifestyle. He finds the pendant around the dead man’s neck. He takes it off, picks the man’s purse and credit card and drives back home. His life changes apparently for the better. His wife is thrilled but the nine-year-old daughter Arati (Surangana) feels left out and alone. Prem’s and Vibha’s values tumble as if they never existed but their aspirations for wealth, power and success, in their terms, are fulfilled. The ultimate price Prem has to pay is with his life. He drives back to the beach, gives away the things he carries to a beggar, discards the pendant that changed his life and waits for death when the moon fades away. It is a beautiful closure.

Between these two points, the film reveals an ugly world of corruption, adultery, sexual permissiveness and deceit. The director makes the magic pendant an excuse to open a window to a world of adulterous and promiscuous sex for business gains, as revenge, or, simply for the excitement that taboo sex carries in as crude and as brazen ways as possible. The characters have no morals and no conscience. Respectable wives jump into any man’s bed and influential men are game for any kind of back-stabbing of a rival including orchestrating the gang-rape of a rival’s little girl. The strategic camera angles specially during the badly choreographed and performed item number featuring too very bad-looking girls with figures to match give the game away. Prem and Vibha’s response to their daughter’s gang-rape is very casual after the initial shock. Strange! The magic of Purbayan Chatterjee’s musical score is lost in the bad positioning of the songs with high-decibel sound-bytes. Even the two beautiful numbers by Ustad Rashid Khan are a sheer waste. Wasted similarly are talented actors like Paran Bandopadhyay as a beggar-mendicant and Swagata Mukherjee who is the home secretary’s wife but is fleshed out to appear like a modern, city-bred brothel madam!

Antim Shwash Sundar has neither magic nor realism. The only magic that will possibly keep you glued to your seat till the end is the marvelous acting of Subrat Dutta as Prem who transforms this film into a one-man show.

Shoma A. Chatterji

Bomkesh Bakshi -Abir Chatterjee and Saswata Chatterjee

Review: BOMKESH BAKSHI – VERY GOOD

Cast and Crew:

• Produced and Presented by: Shibaji Panja and Kaustubh Roy
• Banner: R.P. Techvision India Pvt. Ltd.
• Direction: Anjan Dutt
• Cinematography: Indraneel Mukherjee
• Art Direction: Gautam Basu
• Editing: Arghya Kamal Mitra
• Cast: Abir Chatterjee, Saswata Chatterjee, Biswajit Chakraborty, Phalguni Chatterjee, Swastika Mukherjee, Chandan Sen, Kalyan Chatterjee, Swagata Mukherjee, Ushashie Chakraborty, Pijush Ganguly.
• Release date: 13^th August, 2010
• Rating: 8/10

Saradindu Bandopadhyay is an outstanding pillar of Bengali literature though he spent most of his creative life outside Bengal. He created the best Bengali sleuth ever in the name and style of Bomkesh Bakshi whose charisma refuses to fade across three generations of Bengalis. He wrote 33 detective stories with the same detective and his friend-cum-alter-ego Ajit, who is both narrator and writer of all his detective case histories. Basu Chatterjee’s Bomkesh series in Hindi starring Rajit Kapoor as the detective was very popular. Satyajt Ray made Chiriakhana (1967) based on a Bomkesh murder mystery in which Uttam Kumar played the only Bomkesh Bakshi for screen in his entire career and won the first National Award for the Best Actor. Bomkesh was born in 1932 and his career ended in 1969. Sandip Ray made a television series on Bomkesh Bakshi stories. Swapan Ghosal made another one and there is a third episodic serial on the same sleuth for another Bengali channel.

Bomkesh Bakshi Bengali Film Still

Adim Ripu is about the murder of Anadi Babu (Biswajit Chakraborty), a wealthy but ill-mannered and lecherous, aged man who lives in an old mansion. He is shot from behind as he stands on one of the long balconies of his house watching the fireworks in the compound below. Bomkesh Bakshi (Abir Chatterjee) steps in to solve the murder. Everyone who lives in this house is suspect. Anadi’s two nephews Nimai and Nitai who stay separately, and were threatening him for their share of his ill-gotten wealth are also suspects. Sometime later, Anandi Babu’s friend-turned blackmailer (Kalyan Chatterjee) who is forever drunk, is also killed in a dark alley. Thanks to the telepathic and real bonding between Bomkesh and his alter-ego Ajit (Saswata Chatterjee), they traverse the labyrinthine alleys of strange characters, their interaction and incidents against the backdrop of the communal riots of 1963 in Calcutta, the two murders are solved but with a twist in the tale that is not a happy one.

The film opens on a violent scene of arson ending capturing the killing of one man by another (away from the frame) when some parts of Kolkata seem to be under severe communal tension. Dutt has brought forward the time setting from 1947 to 1963 to offer the audience a glimpse of the Calcutta that existed during that time where Park Street was agog with the songs of a hotel singer Shiuli (Swastika Chatterjee), where Bantul (Chandan Sen) sells everything that should not be sold in the open from firearms to drugs, where even small publishers and book shop dealers knew everything about authors and writers, never mind the tension-filled backdrop of firing, stabbing and arson.

The characterizations throw up a rainbow of colours, or, perhaps a prism through which you see a world of the Sixties you have never seen before. Nonibala Das (Swagata Mukherjee) who approaches Bomkesh in the beginning is a complex character with dark shades. She tries to keep to herself and is fiercely protective of her adopted son Prabhat (Rudraneel Ghosh) who was also adopted by Anadi Babu later who got him trained in book binding and in opening a book shop. Keshta (Kalyan Chatterjee), Nripen (Orindol Bagchi), the so-called secretary of Anadi Babu, Gadananda (Pijush Ganguly) Shiuli’s boyfriend are a virtual medley of characters drawn as if, out of a magician’s hat. Bomkesh deals with each one of them with his slick detecting skills dominated more by his ability to read into the minds of the characters than with the detailed physical observation powers of Sherlock Holmes.

Bokesh Bakshi Bengali Film by Anjan Dutta

Abir Chatterjee in his first single-hero role after an okay debut in Cross Connection brings across Bomkesh with the restraint, the subtle arrogance, the dignity that matches the original or perhaps improves upon it. Like his literary parallel, he is middle-class, sharp, full of ready wit and poetry, and unlike most detectives in literature, is not eccentric. Saswata Chatterjee is the perfect foil as Ajit, the narrator-cum-friend who often voices his exasperation for Bomkesh playing his cards close to his chest. Dutt has the uncanny directorial talent of bringing out the best in very good actors whose potential is not explored properly.  Kalyan Chatterjee as the alcoholic blackmailer Keshta is brilliant and so is Chandan Sen as Bantul, the dealer in illicit goods. Pijush Ganguly portrays Gadananda completely against his usual image. Swastika as the hotel crooner looks beautiful and pulls off her arrogant irreverence very well indeed. Biswajit Chakraborty has very little to do. Swagata Mukherjee as Nonibala invests the character with the right degree of masculinity, shrewd calculation mixed with the mother’s blindness to her child’s mistakes. The two women characters are very strong, aggressive and complex. Phalguni Chatterjee as the opportunistic lawyer who changes colour like a chameleon is a wonderful cameo. But it is Rudraneel Ghosh who steals the film from the other characters and runs away with the credit. Prabhat is timid, diffident, knowledgeable and intelligent but apologetic about his standing in Anadi Babu’s household.  He continues to surprise us with his brilliant versatility in every film. He defies every rule in the book of the conventional screen hero with his very unconventional looks and lack of height by undercutting these with his mind-blowing histrionics.

With Dutt who is also actor, singer, composer and lyric writer at the helm and his son Neel scoring the music, it must have been difficult to resist the temptation to fill the scenario with a melodious background score and songs galore. But he evinces incredible control by using music very sparingly, thoughtfully and fittingly from beginning to end. The music is just there, unobtrusive yet making its mood-centric presence felt as a subtle layer to the proceedings in the foreground.

Gautam Basu’s art direction and Indraneel Mukherjee’s cinematography are the other high points of the film captured on location against the backdrop of the communal riots with fire raging in some pockets of Calcutta where Bomkesh and Ajit negotiate the lanes with care and caution and which snatches the life of Keshta. The skyline is mostly orange while the indoor shots of Bomkesh’s home gleams with the polish of wood, a photograph here, a wall-hanging there, with Bomkesh smoking from time to time and looking solemnly through his black-framed glasses, an addition to the screen character not there in the original. Anadi Babu’s spacious home is probably shot in Kolkata’s Laha Bari. The lighting is outstanding, capturing the shadows of the night in the Park Street hotel where Bomkesh and Ajit are shown out of focus in the background as the camera and the bright light zooms on Shiuli’s face and body. The long shots of Anadi and Keshta running away along the railway tracks in the flashback are good because they are crisp and short. Arghya Kamal Mitra’s editing takes care of the rest. You see a Calcutta you have either not seen or have forgotten about – the cinema posters on the walls, the music streaming through, the old, black instrument called the telephone with its age-old ring tone in a world where the cell phone did not exist, Nonibala’s starched Bengali cotton saris worn just right, her Conan Doyle left open on her desk, Bomkesh and Ajit’s spotless white kurta-pyjamas juxtaposed against the printed shirts of Bantul and Gadananda, Swastika’s sultry make-up and hairdo, the works.

There is one grouse though. The scene showing the interaction between Bomkesh who suddenly meets a Muslim friend from school ready for the kill is uncalled for. Dutt also embarks on the Hindu-Muslim issue at places to fit into the turbulent backdrop and time but visuals and the sound design are so ambient and fitting that such intrusions are redundant.

Bomkesh Bakshi is perhaps Anjan Dutt’s most finished and sophisticated production till date. He deserves kudos for placing a challenging Saradindu classic on film. Bengali cinema is not well known for films made in the detective genre that keeps the audience hooked from beginning to end. Bomkesh Bakshi is different. The entire Bengali audience spanning two generations, have either read the story or watched a televised version of the story or heard it from someone else. Yet, not once do you feel the predictability washing over you because you know who did it.

by Shoma A. Chatterji

Cast and Crew:

• Direction: Animesh Roy
• Banner: Adinnil Films
• Music: Samidh Rishi
• Cast: Soumili Biswas, Indrajeet Chakraborty, Arpita Dutta Choudhury, Alakananda Roy, Barun Chakraborty
• Special appearance: Sohini Pal and Kailash Kher
• Rating: 1/10

Review: U-TURN – TAKE A U-TURN FOR THIS ONE

U-TURN Arpita and Soumili

U-Turn is the very first Bengali film tackling the serious psychological issue of Dissociative Identity Disorder, claims the press release of the film. This is the USP that drew a good press for the film’s press show. But the disappointment is multiplied several times over with the film, its story that does nothing to justify the theme, the characterizations and the logic that is absent right through.

What is Dissociative Identity Disorder? The film has no answer. The audience does not have an inkling what the film is al about. It takes U-turns at every turn and perhaps this inspired the title. Like many stories telecast in horror serials on Indian channels, this too begins with a group of friends taking off on a trip to the hills 20 kms away from Chatla without a booking. But are they really friends? “Calling us friends is like insulting the very concept called friendship,” says Sana, one of the girls who, incidentally, is pregnant from a one-night-stand with Jayanta, a boy from the same group. Orbit, another boy, is blackmailing her constantly with photographs he has taken of the one-night stand. He has also supposedly ‘kidnapped’ Jayanta (along with the group?) for some shady boss for a ransom from his millionaire father. One friend, a Sikh, is blackmailing another girl, Mamma (what kind of name is that, pray?) so friendship is redefined. The bespectacled Saswati (Arpita Dutta Choudhury) is a mean sort and keeps dangling the money bit to insult her so-called friends other than pointing fingers at our heroine Runa (Soumili Biswas) for the disappearance of the boys in the group, one by one. Some friendship this! This Runa’s past keeps haunting and overshadowing her present. Her father was murdered in cold blood by her step-mother while the step-mother’s daughter goes missing.  One wonders why her guardian (Alakananda Ray) did not make any attempt at consulting a psychiatrist to treat her ward no one knows. Equally intriguing is the way she eggs the young girl on to go dancing away her blues in the night with her boyfriend. At one point, one feels the elderly lady is an ayah. “Your father was like a brother to me, or perhaps my son”, she says. Yet Runa’s friends refer to her as the girl’s grandmother!

U-TURN Indrajeet and Soumili

There is the typical bungalow on top of a hill looked after by a limping, suspicious looking man dressed in black with an ugly scar running across his face. But he turns out to be a kindly sort. The bungalow is the same one in which the mentally sick girl lived as a child and from where her father met his death in a contrived car crash that robbed her close step sister from her. The bungalow is cinematographed at bizarre angles to make it appear as if it is dangling along a hill slope. The characters are rootless, restive, amoral and sick! The most intriguing character is Bibek Roy (Indrajeet) who appears from nowhere to undo the knots of mystery one after another. He discovers that Sid who was in love with the heroine is dead and so is the Sikh boy. But the stink from the bodies should have uncovered the corpses much before Bibek solved the riddle. Who is Bibek? He claims to be a trekker and an aimless traveller. But he solves the mystery of who has committed the murders, the truth about Runa’s past and diagnoses her Dissociative Identity Disorder. A tall order for any one much less a young man whose profession remains the biggest mystery in the film. Is he a police officer? Is he a psychiatrist? Is he the aimless trekker he claims to be? Or is he the lover boy who falls for the first pretty girl that comes his way?

U-TURN Soumili Biswas

Soumili Biswas is wasted in the central role with shallow characterization. Her appearance is made worse with the wig she wears. The cosmetic lenses do nothing to improve the situation. Arpita, with a similar wig is terrible as Saswati. She overacts to the hilt and is very irritating to the eye and the ears. The whole film is filled with eerie but very loud sound effects that disturb more than add either meaning or aesthetics to the film. One almost longs for the silent film at some points. Indrajeet does justice to his ill-etched role as much as the script allows him to.  Kailash Kher and Sohini Pal’s ‘guest appearances’ are limited to a most horribly picturised crowded and meaningless scene shot in a disco ambience. Please keep away from the film unless you wish to become an unwilling patient of Dissociative Identity Disorder!

by: Shoma A. Chatterji

Shinjini-Sara Raat Bengali Film

SARA RAAT is a 2010 Bengali film directed by Ranjitmal Kankaria starring Shinjinwi, Abhik, Anuripa, Mrinal Mukherjee and others. Enjoy the complete film review of SARA RAAT at CalcuttaTube.

Cast and Crew:

• Story: Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay
• Produced and directed by: Ranjitmal Kankaria
• Screenplay: Partha Banerjee
• Cast: Shinjini, Abhik, Anuripa, Mrinal Mukherjee
• Rating: 2/10

Review: SARA RAAT – MUCH ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay was a noted Bengali littérateur. His original novel Sara Raat (The Whole Night) was penned in 1959 and turned out to be one of his most popular works because it was futuristic at a time when wives were rarely more educated than their husbands. It was also a much debated novel because of its way of looking at husband-wife relationships. The story goes that Uttam Kumar had once expressed a wish to play the protagonist Shankar if it were ever made into a film. Alas! Uttam Kumar has left us 30 years ago and we are left with a half-baked attempt at a celluloid representation of the story more than six decades later.

Shankar (Abhik) is an 8^th standard drop-out who is the do-gooder Robin Hood of the neighbourhood. He whiles away his time and energy leading the local gang of unruly youths, lording over the neighbourhood club and building up his body to be able to flex his muscles at one go. His family inheritance has been snatched by his uncle who drives him out of the family home along with his widowed mother. This is some new kind of Robin Hood who does not blink before kidnapping a groom from a neighbouring village because he has demanded a hefty dowry. The same Shankar however, throws his principles in the air when he demands Rs.5000 from his mother-in-law though the girl he marries is a graduate! A rising conflict with a childhood friend finds Shankar in prison. His mother kills herself in shock and his wife Indrani (Shinjini) leaves him out of shame. The story goes on from one melodramatic twist to another, exaggerating episodes in the original novel so much that the film becomes an entity unto itself.

The characterizations are paper-thin and contradictory at every point. The uncle who drives Shankar out turns out to be am affectionate, quiet and nice guy when Shankar comes back to claim his share of the property. Shankar does some good work for the people of the village he shifts to such as opening up a free dispensary, helping in building up a proper road and a school. But he remains as irresponsible as ever towards his family. If Indrani left him for his irresponsible and callous behaviour, how does she accept him in the end? The film is not a patch on Mukhopadhyay’s original novel with its timeless quality and futuristic perspective. It is simply a melodrama with holes another film could easily slip through. A few Tagore songs are a welcome relief. Both Shinjini and Aniripa who plays Jaya, the new woman in Shankar’s life, appear stiff and need to work very hard indeed on their diction. Abhik’s English on the other hand, is too good to be true considering his rural backdrop and his eighth-standard education. Thankfully, the author is no longer around to watch the tragedy his work is reduced to.

by: Shoma A. Chatterji