Kolkata Calling (Bengali) / Ghost of a story

Music: Arnab

Cast: Moon Moon Sen, Raima Sen, Riya Sen, Ritwick Chakroborty, Samrat Chakraborti, Kaushik Sen, Kushal Chakraborty, June Malia and Shataf Figar

By Shoma A. Chatterji

Ranjan (Kaushik Sen), an aspiring film-maker traumatised by his divorce, quits a high-paying job to make a documentary film. When facing a funds crunch, an old friend (June Malliah) asks him to show some footage of the film so she can help.
The making of the documentary brings other sub-plots. Ranjan tries to involve three young characters as his ‘subjects.’ They are social failures. Shuddho (Ritwick Chakraborty) wants to be in films, his middle-class parents bear the brunt of his failed dreams. Krittika (Riya Sen) is a naïve girl craving for money though she looks like a rich girl. Her mother (Moon Moon Sen) is a high-class sex worker using her apartment as residence and sex parlour. Deep (Samrat Chakraborti), a brilliant student, returns to Kolkata from the US as he is a drug addict. He does not seem to care for the counseling at the rehab his parents have arranged. His life changes when he meets a young girl (Raima Sen) at the clinic’s waiting room and is intrigued to discover that she is following him everywhere.
Of the three, Shuddho is the only one who is convinced that one day he will make it to the top. Krittika’s dreams of earning quick money in a short span is destroyed when a model photographer ditches her after making her pregnant. In order to find out who the girl-in-white is, Deep visits the rehab clinic everyday. In the biggest of anti-climaxes, the girl is an over-friendly ghost who died of drug abuse and wants to rescue a friend from a similar fate. End of the story. Not really. The only one to turn the tables on one and all is Shuddho who, when he realises that he will never become an actor, decides to become a suicide bomber in exchange for money! Suicide bomber for what? “I do not know and am not interested in knowing” he says with a nonchalance that is very strange in a boy who has lived in Howrah all his life minus any political affiliations!
The camera-work is brilliant. The music is very good, bettered by the acting of the cast save Samrat who holds a fixed expression of sadness all through. The editing is good too. So, where is the catch? The name Kolkata Calling is a misnomer. There is hardly much of ‘Kolkata’ in the film and considering that almost everyone speaks mostly in English, it could have been titled anything. It would have made no difference to the film’s outcome. The idea was novel but the execution is too clichéd. A ghost, Mainak? Why?