Slice of Life

Cast: Victor Banerjee,Rupa Ganguly,Kiera Chaplin,Ankur Khanna,Soha Ali Khan,Nedumudi Venu,Arundhati Nag,Karthik Kumar,Shayan Munshi,Zeenat Aman

Rating: **1/2

Three strands,three cities. Rajshree Ojha borrows from Nirmal Verma’s short stories to come up with her characters and their stories,cross-cutting between them to see where they are in their journeys. Finally,Chaurahen is about loving and losing,and life’s little truths,and it manages to hit the mark on and off.

A getting-on-in-years

Dr Bose (Banerjee) looks for solace in the arms of a much younger Laia (Chaplin),while his wife (Ganguly) stares silently into space. This trio is in Kolkata. Over in Mumbai,Farooq (Khanna) can’t seem to get over the loss of a parent,even as his bright-eyed girlfriend Ira (Khan) tries to get him out of it. Kochi is where Naveen (Kumar) is back,on a brief visit,watching over his parents (Venu and Nag) as they struggle to cope with the loss of an older son (Munshi).

The older man and younger woman trope falls into some slush: Banerjee has done this before,and Chaplin (yes,THE Charlie’s granddaughter) is flitty,flirty but not to much purpose. Rupa’s sad wife is more successful: she lets her eyes do the talking. And the trouble with Khanna and Khan is that they are made to talk too much. In a talky film (most of it in English,laced with bits of Hindi,Bangla and Malayalam),with not enough silences,their chatter becomes inane after a while.

The third story has the most depth. The excellent Nedumudi Venu and Arundhati Nag make their couple believable,even though Nag sometimes overdoes the “simple middle-classness” of her housewife-mother. But there’s no denying the pain they transmit while trying to come to grips with their younger son’s insistence to get back to “his life” in Vienna. Kumar,as the conflicted yet loving Naveen,gets the best mileage out of this segment. Oh,and Zeenat Aman shows up in a cameo,which doesn’t signpost her presence as much as tell us that she’s still around.

Ojha,whose previous credits include the dreadful Aisha,seems to have found her voice with this one. There is some obviousness. But there are also enough nice moments in Chaurahen to make you hopeful for her next venture.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com