Movie Review: Chowrasta Crossroads of Love

Watched yesterday in PVR. Yes I was feared about the movie won't be there in next week, so tried to watch it as soon as possible, although was not getting a partner for it, managed my friend to come with me. The story you will get in any news paper (the quoted one is from TOI). I am trying to tell you about my exceptions and what I got.

It seems Anjan Datta is doing serious and comercial movies one after another. It starts form The Bong Connection (a big hit) then Bow Barracks Forever (not a big hit but a good story and it explains something), Chalo Let's Go (full enterteinment), and then Chowrasta. I think next will be a commercial big hit movie.

I was expecting Parambrata somewhere in the story, but it's ok. Two things I didn't understand, Victor Bannerjee got Bodhi but how and when? He is superb in the film acts as the story teller, or kind of Vivek in the old days yatra.

Aparajita did good, showed how hypocryts live inside a bengali mind.

Saswata, Rupa Ganguly story is quite same as the story of Warish, I thought but it's not. I don't know what that guy named Jojo was doing in the whole movie.

Some says it is story of relationship, but I see a movie about compromise. Those who don't compromise in life should watch the movie once.

Director Anjan Dutt uses the sylvan town (Darjeeling) to explore the lives of an odd assortment of people who make up its social fabric. There's Victor Banerjee, the tea planter who writes love letters to his deceased wife and waits for a balmy day to jump off the cliff. He calls it flying! There's the stern school teacher (Saswata Chatterjee) who can barely handle the return of his divorced wife (Rupa Ganguly), and her new lover, into his life again. There are the pair of honeymooners who are already afflicted by the first wave of marital blues, specially since their's is a runaway marriage between an earthy Punjabi and a Tagore-loving Bengali. And then, there is the terrorist (Atul Kulkarni), dreaming of Gorkhaland, even as the law is after him and his paymasters are duping him.

The sundry lives criss-cross each other on and around the shadowy chowrasta -- the central point of Darjeeling -- with each character trying to find a new equilibrium in his/her unsettled life. All this, while the sun rises and sets on just another ordinary day in the colonial hill resort that's somehow been left behind in the -- or is it left alone -- in the raucous march of time.

The film may be low on high drama but the director manages to create a mesmerising mood and draws you into the play of emotions that unfolds with a lazy charm. Almost in keeping with the pulse of Darjeeling, captured beautifully on screen by cinematographer Indraneel Mukherjee. While almost everyone pitches in a smart cameo, it is Victor Banerjee's lonely, aging escapist act that remains with you, with the resonance of the songs and the poetry that he so generously spouts through his philosophical ramblings, with garlic bread and whisky.