Laptop (Bangla)

A cabbie (Rajesh Sharma) steals a laptop as he has to foot the bill for his wife’s artificial insemination. The CEO (Arindam Sil) of the clinic accuses the house manager (Pijush Ganguly) because the cabbie sold the laptop to him. His computer geek son (Gaurav Chakraborty) begins a relationship with the pretty young model aspirant (Ridhima Ghosh) whose details he finds on the laptop. She turns out to be the CEO’s daughter. The CEO forces the manager to leave the city overnight with his family. He pays his overdue rent with the laptop to the owner of the flat. It lands in the hands of a blind writer (Kaushik Ganguly) who owns the dilapidated mansion. He gives the laptop to his typist (Ananya Chatterjee) as a parting gift but she sells it off to the writer’s publisher (Rahul Bose). The blind writer realises that his relationship with the typist goes deeper than the surface professionalism. But it is too late. It is late for the young computer geek because his girlfriend feels betrayed when she learns how he got to know of her. The publisher discovers that the sperm he donated to some stranger’s wife is now an eight-year-old boy. He sets off to see him. The stories,though,remain unfinished and incomplete.

Sirsa Ray’s camera weaves its magic moving through the multilayered scenario shifting from a brightly-lit electronic shop to the streets of Kolkata through an eating house. It then steps into the dark,sinister interiors of the writer’s home,closing in on his hands as they feel the keys of the laptop till that last frame with the little Lepcha boy running away into the mist grabbing the laptop. The background score too,deserves a mention. The writer emotes his feelings through action. The eating house boys scream out the orders,their shrill voices overlapping. The distant chants of Vedic hymns are misunderstood by the writer as wedding mantras for the typist’s wedding. The shots of the little boy’s toy gun akin to the police’s gunshot sounds rending the open air of the Darjeeling Mall is a powerful comment on the uncertainties of contemporary life. Mayookh Bhaumik’s background score is brilliant,blending into the pathos of the theme,the characters and their interactions.

Koushik Ganguly and Ananya Chatterjee steal away the prizes from the rest who come a very close second. Saswata Chatterjee as the frustrated husband of the little boy’s mother (Churni Ganguly) is a bit too self-conscious. Rahul Bose is a major disappointment. Anjana Bose as his estranged wife is completely redundant in the story. And the penultimate moments where the police are chasing the publisher are too loud for a very quiet and low-key film like Laptop. The movie reaches beyond its physical reality to mutate the lives of those whose hands it reaches purely by twists of destiny. The unusual storyline is not easy to narrate. But Kaushik Ganguly manages to interweave four different narratives of people from different walks of life from different socio-economic backgrounds through the laptop.

RATINGS : The four stars are for direction,

cinematography,music and acting.