Punoruthhan

Mahendra Mullick (Victor Banerjee) is the patriarch of an extended family that made its riches through a production house involved in manufacturing potato flakes. It is such a prosperous business that three Marwari multimillionaires are vying to appropriate the business mainly by foul means. They employ Mahendra’s sister (Dolon Roy)’s husband Bikram (Rajesh Sharma)’s agency to get at their target. How is the Mullick family saved? Enter Siddhartha (Priyangshu Chatterjee) who arrives from the US and appoints his lawyer Ambika Das (Sabyasachi Chakraborty) to do the needful. Siddhartha is Mahendra’s son born out of his clandestine church marriage to Sujata (Reema Lagoo) in the US. He was forced to abandon the pregnant Reema and to marry her older sister Sabitri (Soma Dey) forgetting all about this son except through photographs of him as a baby. Yet,he has adopted Dona (Rituparna Sengupta) an orphan girl who sticks to her adoptive parents through thick and thin belying the saying ‘blood is thicker than water.’ The romance between Siddhartha and Dona is understated and expressed only in the end when the film closes on a happy ending.

The film actually aims to drive home the unscrupulous ways of Marwari businessmen in Kolkata vis-à-vis the honesty and integrity in the way in which Mullick,a Bengali,came by his wealth. But this is presented in a loud and crude manner and is undercut by the very diabolic way in which Priyanka’s Bengali father (Biswajit Chakraborty) plans the kidnapping of his own daughter to gain access to Mullick’s estate! So where does the argument go? Who cares when a film is busy presenting badly orchestrated item numbers,wrongly positioned song sequences and badly edited action scenes in the climax?

Mullick’s other two sons,Kuntal (Indrajeet) and Kanchan (Abhishek) leave this sinking Mullick ship to tie their destinies to the millionaire fathers of their non-descript girlfriends,even when their mother dies of an accidental fall down the stairs. This does not behave well for the Bengali value system at all. Kanchan’s girlfriend (Priyanka) is the daughter of a Bengali multimillionaire while Kuntal’s girlfriend is the daughter of one of the three multimillionaires who are eyeing the Rs.4000 crore Mullick estates including the business. Priyanka is forever prancing around in micro-shorts revealing her ample thighs and moving two left feet in the name of dance.

The film is produced by the Pailan Group,am ambitious educational institution that also has a department in film training. Most of the younger cast such as Priyanka,Abhishek etc are students of this department and this adds to the film’s terribly amateurish finish though the director Rishi Mukherjee,has been in theatre and television for years together. The sole saving grace of the film is in the acting department where the major characters,with special reference to Sabyasachi Chakraborty,Rajesh Sharma,Victor Banerjee,Reema Lagoo and Priyangshu Chatterjee who execute a lot of restraint in role that could have gone out of control. Rituparna Sengupta is wasted in a coy-and-delicate looking role that suits neither her talent nor her versatility. The music is no good and the same goes for the songs.

Verdict: **

No more than two stars for this film – for the acting and for the director’s ability to handle the large acting cast.