Bikas Mishra reviews Arindam Nandy’s Via Darjeeling

It’s not very often that you watch a new Bollywood release that at least attempts to tell a story differently. This is where Via Darjeeling scores over others. No, I don’t mean it’s a path breaking film. We have seen films where a story is approached from multiple vantage points, right from Kurosawa’s Rashomon to the recent Hollywood flick of a little direct title (Vantage Point). Via Darjeeling is little different, it’s not a pursuit of that elusive “real” rather it’s a commentary on the craft of storytelling. Despite its various shortcomings, the film achieves a Godardian profoundness, where we eagerly await the story to unfold though with a conscious awareness that it’s a just a story.

Ankur Sharma (Kay Kay Menon) a marketing manager gets married to his boss’s daughter Rimli (Sonali Kulkarni). On the last day of their honeymoon in Darjeeling, they had to deal with a rogue driver, a fleeting pursuer and a “nosey” hotel manager. While Rimli wants Ankur to extend their honeymoon, Ankur wants to go back to Kolkata to attend an important meeting. Story takes a different turn when Ankur disappears without a trace all of a sudden.

Interestingly, the filmmaker instead of focusing on the pursuit of the suspense that he builds meticulously, takes the story on a different plane altogether. Though the story has all the ingredients of a perfect thriller but for debut filmmaker Arindam Nandy resolution of the story doesn’t matter as much as the exploration of various possibilities inherent in it.

Post interval and post disappearance of Ankur Sharma, story lands up in the living room of Ronodeep Sen (Rajat Kapoor) and his homely wife Preeti Sen (Simone Singh), who’re playing host to a cozy gathering over drinks of their friends Inspector Robin Dutt (Vinay Pathak), Mallika Tiwari (Sandhya Mridul) and Kaushik Chatterjee (Prashant Narayanan). The story is retold with possible reasons of Ankur’s disappearance by all of them. Instead of taking the story forward, every version lets us delve deeper into the narrators. Possibilities are endless and facts (if any) and imagination of the onscreen narrators often criss-cross leaving us wondering if it’s all just a figment of imagination!

Towards the end, director does fall into the trap of being burdened by the expectation of resolving the story and goes for a rather predictable ending. However, he also smartly shuts the door on the trappings with a little play of words (read names of the characters). I know I might not be making much sense here but only if you haven’t seen the film.

One of the reasons why I chose this movie over its big brother, better starred (I mean critics’ ratings) “Thoda Pyar Thoda Magic” was the ensemble of actors. Surprisingly, acting is one of the low points of the film. Sonali acts terribly bad at places, so does Parvin Dabbas. Looking at performances of Kay Kay and Pathak, I also felt that these great actors are getting typecast and their roles are getting dictated by their onscreen persona.

To sum it up, I would repeat my words-Via Darjeeling isn’t a pathbreaking work of cinema and it’s also flawed as a film. However, it’s engaging. Arindam Nandy deserves kudos for telling engaging stories and daring to play around with cinematic structure of the film.

He must prove the critics wrong, who say “It’s pretty okay to be different, but when you’re looking at the Indian audiences and the kind of cinema they tilt towards, you cannot be too experimental” (Taran Adarsh) and continue to explore cinema as a medium. Arindam you must experiment little more, we the audiences, are game for it.

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