Bhalobasha Off Route-e

Directed by: Arunavo Khasnobis

Music: Debarpito Saha

Cast: Rahul,Saswata Chatterjee,

Sudarshana Sengupta,Rudranil Ghosh,Aviraj,Kharaj Mukherjee,Tanushree Chakraborty,Parthasarathi Deb,Padmanavo Dasgupta

Two brothers,Siddhartha (Rahul) and Sandip,excellent footballers,arrive at a small town. It has another pair of brothers,Jagan (Rudraneel) and Fagan (Aviraj) who practically rule this police state with an impotent police station. However,though Sandip (Saswata Chatterjee) is brilliant,he loses out in his penalty kick and is forced to go back home with mud on his face. But in the meantime,the two young guys have fallen in love with two sisters Shinjini (Sudarshana) and Ragini (Tanushree) and lose their focus on the game. Sandip mysteriously misses a penalty kick and when his girlfriend turns against him,he comes back home defeated and disillusioned forever and becomes a die-hard misogynist.

Why did he lose the penalty kick? Siddhartha never stops wondering. Finally,the truth reveals itself when Ragini is brought at his door. She has lost her speech from a shock. Sandip is persuaded to go and play another match in the same town against the same dishonest team run by Jagan and Fagan. This time they win and bring their ‘would-be’ brides home. Sandip gets busy rehabilitating the disturbed Ragini.

The story of Bhalobasha Off-Route-e needed some detailing because of its offbeat storyline that deals with the game of football,which Bengalis can die for. It had great potential to explore a love story born within the framework of a fight-till-death match but the director seems to have lost focus somewhere along the way and the film becomes a soppy,sentimental drama that is neither here nor there. The saving grace of the film is the performance of the actors who do complete justice to the faith their director has placed on them. Though Saswata does a wonderful blend of the romantic and the playful,the hate-filled loner and the pessimistic loser,he looks a bit aged for the role and is a mismatch with the young Tanushree as his romantic interest. Rahul as Siddhartha is getting a bit predictable and boring but the script does not help him enough to excel himself. Aviraj,who is a very good football player in real life,has been given a negative image that does not give him the chance to showcase his command over the game. Kanchan Mullick does a good comic take as the woman who tries to talk some sense into the besotted Sandip in vain. Tanushree and Sudarshana Sengupta as her sister Shinjini are dressed in designer kurtas in a small- town setting that is stretching reality a bit too far. The music is okay but the editing is not. The cinematography barely passes muster while the ambience is picturesque.

RATINGS : The two stars are for the wonderful performances and for the off-route storyline that could have taken the film miles ahead had it not surrendered to the demands of soppy sentimentality.