Starring: Riddhi Sen, Sudipta Chakraborty, Kaushik Sen, Rajatava Dutta
Directed by Anindyo Chatterjee
Rating: ***
The fictional Deshbandhu bylane is a narrow street that meanders through an old, typically careworn neighbourhood in north Calcutta along the Hooghly, where the protagonist Foara’s mother lives. From rooftops of decaying buildings, housewives look across at the Howrah Bridge hovering like a silver totem over the congested skyline of Calcutta. Skinny urchins poke fun at stuffy bhadralok and holler ‘Bulldog!’ before scampering away under crumbling staircases. Slimy, red-hued politicians discuss the next polls with thugs and moneylenders. A para (as neighbourhoods are known in Bangla) club captain laments the passing of the glory days of football.
Teenager Foara has just been rusticated from boarding school for slapping the principal. His mother delivers a resounding slap across his defiant, bony face with its newly sprouting mustache and guiltless eyes. When he tells her why, she looks away. It has something to do with his father, whom the boy has never seen.
The story about Foara’s father is just a thread—a rich, textured one—running through the heartwarming tapestry which Anindyo Chatterjee weaves with many shades of colour in his debut film. His narrative is packed with sub-plots, quirky characters (all connected to Deshbandhu Bylane) and their individual stories that intersect each other.
But it is not in his characterisation or story alone that Chatterjee excels. He achieves the rare balance in creating an ambience in which, like life itself, opposite emotions ring true. The acute emptiness of losing someone that slowly gives way to the immediate, immense joy of winning a match. The anger of betrayal that gets swept away by the desire for love. Crucially, Anindyo has been able to recreate believably the uneventful middle ground which we tread for the most part of our lives without making us lose interest.
One of the film’s strengths is the casting. Sudipta, with her ability to convey a range of emotions, is the perfect mother to Foara, who strikes a fine balance in being both adorable and irritating at the same time. Rajatava makes an entertaining, foul-mouthed, well-meaning football-crazy coach. Kaushik is brilliant as the dodgy local politician.
The script, predictably Anindya’s forte (he’s the singer-songwriter of the wildly popular Bangla band Chandrabindoo), dazzles with humour through a haze of nostalgia (the film is set in the early ’90s). And the excellent soundtrack, very Bangla band-ish, blends harmoniously in.
Open Tee Bioscope is the first line of a Bengali-English rhyme from a childish game. When adults repeat them, the legend goes, the melancholia inherent in the words is supposed to transport one back to childhood. It’s an appropriate title for Anindyo’s film about childhood, growing up and the twilight zone one inhabits before becoming an adult.
