Nostalgia spills over like ink colouring every frame of Chowrasta, Crossroads of Love. It’s a film that sets out to capture the overwhelming sense of past that permeates the lonely lanes of Darjeeling town. Set in these Himalayan altitudes, it pulls the viewer into an elevated timelessness. It lingers like the young men and women who loiter around the chowrasta, the centre of town since colonial times, which the plot of the film revolves around. Here men sit idle on benches and stare blankly as mountain mist gathers around them like memories.
Indraneel Mukherjee’s cinematography reinforces it all through the images of a setting sun. Chowrasta literally means crossroads. Here it takes on the metaphorical sense of meeting point where people’s paths cross, converge and diverge, in the process taking lives (and his narrative) forward. Mystery and suspense form part of the action with parallel plots of kidnap and terrorism running through it. But clearly, characterisation is Anjan Dutta’s greatest strength. He creates and brings to life a motley group of individuals who are delightfully real even though each one is a stereotype.
A failed actress from Bombay (Roopa) lands up with her flashy lover (Arijit Dutta) and bratty son (Neil Bose) to meet her ex-husband, a prim and proper public school teacher (Saswata Chatterjee). A couple who had eloped and are on honeymoon (Naved Aslam and Aparajita Ghosh) are quarrelling. Victor Banerjee is incredible as the old man whose love for his dead wife makes him want to ‘step into her world’. Perhaps the lasting image of the film is the scene where the terrorist (Atul Kulkarni) breaks down when he realises the liberation he’s fighting for is a sham.
However, the philosophical gems of Dutta’s narrative are often too direct and dished out in capsules to be washed down with didactic dialogues and voiceovers choked with poetry and quotable quotes from Keats to Hemingway. And this is unfortunate because clearly it is when the director is not trying so hard to do so that he is really able to convey with much more poignancy the nuances of human character and complexities of interpersonal relationships.
High Fives
Bollywood
1. Dashavatar (dubbed)
2. Aa Dekhe Zara
3. Ek: The Power of One
4. 8x10 Tasveer
5. One Man Army Ongbak 2 (dubbed)
Hollywood
1. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
2. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
3. Obsessed
4. 17 Again
5. Monsters vs Aliens
Rock
1. Sounds of the Universe (Depeche Mode)
2. Twilight (Soundtrack)
3. Dark Horse (Nickelback)
4. Only by the Night (King of Leon)
5. Shallow Life (Lacuna Coil)
Courtesy: Film Information
