Charulata 2011: A Review

I should probably rephrase that. This is not a review. A review requires objectivity. A review requires a calm head. And I am not calm.

I am pissed. Pissed because I spent the better part of a beautiful Saturday afternoon in a room with a thousand other people watching one of my favourite films – probably the greatest film made by one of the greatest directors the world will ever see – butchered by a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual hack who would not know subtlety if it kicked him in the balls. I am pissed that I paid good money to put myself through this torture, and in doing so, contributed to the box office success of this affront to human intelligence. I am pissed that I watched this movie at Nandan, a building inaugurated by Satyajit Ray himself. I apologised to the plaque at the entrance, which was ironically hidden behind a giant poster for the film. I am pissed because I knew this would be bad, but allowed a deadly cocktail of masochism and schadenfreude to guide me to the cinema.

This isn’t a review because a review requires subtlety and tact. In a review, I would not be able to say that Dibyendu Mukherjee plays Sanjay/Amal with the expressions of a pornstar on coke who traded in his brain for a couple of inches of cock (Some people would say that in a review, but I am not some people). In a review, I would not be able to say that the only thing graceful about Rituparna Sengupta’s Chaiti/Charulata2011 (yes, her Facebook profile is called Charulata2011) is the giant wart on her nose. I like that wart. I call it Fred. If she ever wants to get it surgically removed, I will pay more than I did for this movie to keep it as a pet. Bikramjit/Bhupati is played by Arjun Chakraborty, who looks as if he just came out of an LIC commercial. The image of him humping Chaiti is going to haunt me for a few weeks. Thankfully for the Trinamool Congress’s future electoral prospects, Bratya Basu rejected the role after initially accepting it.

Oh yes, the story. Chaiti is the lonely wife of busy newspaper editor Bikramjit. Of course, she has two close friends, Arnobi (played by the actor known only as Rii) and gay BFF Pushpo (played to near perfection by Priya Pal) with whom she frequently hangs out, so she’s not really lonely lonely, but, you know, lonely. Fuck it, why am I being coy, she’s horny. She says as much in the first five minutes. Instead of using a bedpost as a phallic symbol (there is a disappointing lack of bedposts in the film), she masturbates before being interrupted by her awkward husband. She’s suffered a miscarriage (the synopsis on the film’s website says two miscarriages, but I might have missed that while hammering myself on the head), and believes God is punishing her for having a cyber-affair with a stranger on Facebook, the redoubtable Amal (yes, he’s a stranger on Facebook who just happened to use the alias Amal, knowing that in the future, some Bong female called Charulata2011 was going to be lonely and want to chat with him). All she knows about him is that he lives in London and has a beard. No, they’re not having hot, kinky Facebook chat sex, it’s mostly her whining about being lonely and him philosophising, scratch that, babbling faux existentialism and quoting Tagore and the Bee Gees. Because she has a bizarre dream sequence which we know is a dream sequence because Pushpo’s doing a ballet and everyone is speaking in slow motion, she stops chatting with Amal. So he decides to come to Kolkata and she starts talking to him again and decides to meet him. Some humour about beards follows, and then she humps him before feeling bad about it and telling him not to talk to her again.

Meanwhile, Bikramjit has invited Chaiti’s bro and sis-in-law (played excellently by Kaushik Sen and Dolon Roy) from Mumbai to keep her company and said bro begins to con Mr B out of 10 lakh rupees. There is one conversation about values and morals that has all the nuance and coherence of a Baba Ramdev lecture on corruption, through which we are told that the B-Man does not like disloyalty. Then his cousin Sanjay shows up, and surprise! It’s Amal. The rest follows Charulata/Nashtanirh’s plot for a while; just replace all that about Charu’s liberation, her attempts at writing, the swing scene, the part about Charu being unsure of her feelings and the ethics of falling in love with Amal and the beautiful silences that speak so eloquently with average guitar playing and lots of humping. And replace the ending where Bhupati sees Charu break down at the news of Amal’s impending wedding with the clichéd laptop switcheroo and the reading of love emails (even though they mention specific incidents and refer to Bikramjit as Dada, the learned editor who claims to dictate what Bengal thinks is stumped by the use of an alias). Throw in a nicely shot heart attack and another pregnancy.

Like the name suggests, this is a modern take on Tagore’s novella. Its idea of showing modernity is filling a room with as many Apple products as possible (two iPhones, an iPad, two Mac laptops and a Mac desktop at last count), some slick editing with switching between five or six different timelines (fun at first, then confusing, then frustrating, then blah), the animal humping, the Facebook affair (which, intriguingly, takes place on Gmail) and the gay BFF. The direction is average: not one frame does anything to add to the story. Chandril Bhattacharya of Chandrabindoo often bemoans the prudishness of old Bangla culture and how modern Bong pop culture talks about real people and their concerns with no coyness. A bunch of directors in Tollywood claim to be pushing the envelope with ground-breaking films. If this film is representative of this new movement (I haven’t seen the other, better films like Gandu, Bedroom and Baishey Srabon, to be honest), you can keep your revolution. I like some story with my porno, thank you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch the original Charulata. That way, I won’t kill anyone.