Ekti Taraar Khonje

Lately I’ve been going through the phase of cutting people out of my life for a while. It’s my aversion-to-communication phase. I’m also loving being alone after a long time.
Being the sucker for new experiences that I am, I decided to go for a movie at a multiplex alone today. Doesn’t sound like such a task, does it? Well try it on your own sometime. It’s quite a task. Usually, people attach going for movies with merriment in a group. I personally think, though, that watching movies alone can be fun. So I did what I was planning for a while.
I went to watch “Ekti Taraar Khonje” at Fame today. I never thought I’d be one of those sad people ending up at a movie hall all alone but hey, I wasn’t sad. I could concentrate a lot more on the movie and I loved the fact that I was the independent woman who doesn’t care who’s sitting around her. It just means to me that I’m a lot more secure about myself than most people who insist on having somebody by their side no matter what they’re doing. Whether it’s taking a walk alone or going shopping (although I do believe that sometimes shopping is better when with a friend so that she,preferably,can see what you can’t see).
Coming to the movie now…Ekti Taraar Khonje was just another Bengali movie that made me sad. There’s immense talent in Bengal which is untapped, but there are a dozen standing like a wall against that bunch of talented people and making movies which they think are brilliant, but are crappy to people like me. It’s nice to admire Bergman and it’s different when you’re trying to bring in something abstract in a storyline that just converts it to plain bullshit,rendering it of the flow that it so badly deserves because you’re making a commercial movie, Goddamnit! If you want to make an art movie, make a separate one.
“Ekti Taraar Khonje” as a title itself, to begin with, was far too irrelevant. The once in a while ringing phone of Sayan Munshi only emphasised the title very shadily, with “Twinkle twinkle little star”. Cliched and unacceptable.The opening lines by Sayan Munshi in a narrative style were impressive. It raised my expectations. The storyline turned out to be very typical and tried out. I could feel traces of the flop Hindi movie “Mithya” (starring Ranvir Shorey) making its way into a Bengali overrated storyline. It’s disconnected at many places and makes you walk out of the hall. Not with irritation like that produced by Yuvvraaj or Housefull, but by the mere thought that the movie was a wasted attempt at copying something that goes on to add some unnecessary cream over a spoilt cake. The culmination of the movie was yet another offshoot of an inspiration from Kaminey: the bad guys die and the hero survives to romance his girlfriend.
Tollywood is not without gems. Sayan Munshi delivered a more or less consistent performance with a few moments that made him rise above the movie. He’s a talented actor who doesn’t know how to select his script. Arpita Chatterjee was awful. Why she ever left her “happily married” life to act again is beyond me. She’s only a pretty picture and would’ve added an extra bit to the movie had she been dumb. Dhritimaan Chatterjee is not bad. Sayan Munshi’s city friend is commendable though.
What made me want to pull my hair and scream out loud in the hall though was the advertisements. The silly bits added into the script merely for the promotion of Senco Gold and Kaya Skin Clinic. Silly and totally uninspiring. The music is passable. Shaan sings a couple of melodies which sound fresh but some of the songs are very badly timed, adding to the mess that the movie already is.
All in all, a successful attempt at sitting alone in a hall and feeling exhilarated, but a bad movie as a first. I was disappointed in my lookout for a star.