The Chetan Bhagat of Bangla Cinema

I first came across the name 'Srijit Mukherji' in 2010, after his debut film 'Autograph' was released. The film (which I have not watched yet) created quite a stir for being different; and Srijit was hailed as a kind of messiah who will lift the Bangla film industry from the morass it had found itself in. My interest in him was piqued when I learnt he was my junior from Presidency College. So, I went to watch his second film, 'Baishe Shrabon'. Whatever romanticism I was harbouring got a very bad jolt in the very first sequence itself, which was eerily "inspired" by a South Korean film, 'The Chaser' (2008).

I steered clear of Srijit and his films for the next couple of years, till I laid my hands upon 'Chotushkone' this week. Chotushkone, by the way, is Bangla for a quadrilateral. And just like a quadrilateral can be a square, rhombus, rectangle, etc., etc., it seems the film itself has tried to be many things at once. An anthology film wrapped in a revenge drama inside a thriller, for instance. To quote a character from the film itself "It is not a remake of a Tamil blockbuster", true; but the fact that it is being described with words such as 'mesmerising' shows either how starved of quality the Bangla film-going audience is or how ignorant of quality the cinema-goers of the region are - or both.

Quoting another character from the film "Anthology films or portmanteau films have been attempted before in Bangla cinema, but the efforts have failed miserably." I have not watched 'Chaar' by Sandip Ray (so cannot comment on it) but I shall put 'Chotushkone' in the same 'failure' category. When one of the stories (the one that Aparna Sen's character narrates) making up an anthology is more interesting than the film itself, the latter, in my opinion, has failed in its purpose.

Yes, it has an interesting premise, which, yet again quoting another character from the film "smells of" 'The Mousetrap' by Agatha Christie, but that's about the only good thing one can say about 'Chotushkone'. The acting, especially by Goutam Ghose and Aparna Sen is atrocious (the former's segment, particularly, is cringeworthy; and the green filter used therein brings to the mind bile, rather than jealousy); the camera plays with swish pan the way a child of two plays with a new toy; two characters (a guitar-strumming, tattoo-bearing male and a bespectacled female with a befuddled look) serve the singular purpose of accommodating a song in the script; while there are several sequences in black-and-white that are nothing but 'cheats'. Considering another character in the film shows this predilection to (mis) quote (more on that, later) a particular film and its star, let me also drop names by stating that Hitchcock himself had found out the hard way in 'Stage Fright' that the audience is willing to accept a character lying, but visuals cannot lie - they need to be sacrosanct. At the risk of revealing SPOILERS...two individuals cannot look different in a photograph and in flashbacks. And what was all those weird compositions about, especially those where the lower half of a character's face is hidden by placing random objects (like a glass of water) in front of the camera? I know there is a Bangla term 'mukh lokano' (hiding one's face due to shame or guilt). Did the subconscious come to play?

And if that was not enough, the details...or the lack of it. From anachronisms (in one of the scenes, a window AC is shown. That particular model could not have been around during the time period being depicted), a character supposedly exhibiting hyperopia (offering chips from a packet that clearly says 'Chanachur') to the same character attributing a dialogue spoken by Eli Wallach in Sergio Leone's 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' to Clint Eastwood...I can go on and on.

The only character I could relate to was that played by Barun Chanda (and it has nothing to do with the idea I had on how those two gargantuan pillars he bought to decorate his home could be made good use of). I wish there was a mental asylum, where the idea that said film and filmmaker are the harbingers of new wave of Bangla cinema could be admitted; and then those of us who really are looking for something different (the truly awesome 'Herbert' and 'Bhooter Bhabishyat', for instance) could, just like Chanda's character, simply turn our back and walk away.