Keloda In Kashmir

Sounds like a home movie? Right. It is a home movie if you can cut out the marginal acting cast comprising Shankar Chakraborty,Pallavi

Chatterjee,Joyjit and Bhola Tamang,who plays the title role.

Filmmaking is not a casual business and one hopes her experience with the commercial failure of Keloda In Kashmir has driven home this point. The cast is a mixed bunch of absolute amateurs,a few novices who have already played roles in Choudhury’s earlier films and the actors mentioned above. The filmmaking is a disaster not as much for the acting cast as for the handling of the other aspects of filmmaking – camera,editing,music,sound and so on.

Keloda (Bhola Tamang) and his wife Padu while travelling along with a group to Kashmir in a bus,encounter people of all ages and backgrounds and interact with them resulting in funny situations. Well,most of these situations do not really end in fun. The other passengers comprise a pretty young girl who is suicidal after a break-up with her fiancé,three young boys looking for some excitement,a middle-aged divorcee with a keen eye on young men and Kelo’s and his wife’s love-hate jokes.

One must grant it to Choudhury that Keloda In Kashmir had all the makings of a wonderful road movie with lots of fun and adventure. All it succeeds in pulling off are rich and beautiful

visuals of the landscape and snowcapped mountainscapes of the valley as the camera pans generously across Jammu,Srinagar,Dal Lake,Mughal Garden,Sonmarg,Gulmarg and

Pahelgam. The shots inside the bus are terrible and it seems as if the film has used the services of two cinematographers. The Kolkata scenes are much better and more realistic with good portrayals by Shankar Chakraborty,Joyjiit Banerjee and Pallavi Chatterjee. Bhola Tamang tries to put in his best as Keloda but the script fails him miserably.

Ratings : The two stars are for some of the major actors and for the camera’s capture of the locations.