Review: Jaaneman Bangla

Music: Jeet Ganguly

Cinematography: Sailesh Awasthi

Cast: Koel Mullick,Sham Chakraborty,Ashish Vidyarthy,Saswati Guhathakurta

Deba Sham and Ria Koel meet accidentally at a bus terminus. They are runaways with their personal sob stories. Deba is running away from the mafia don Sridhar he worked for. Ria is running away from a forced marriage to her fathers mistress brother. Once they have shared their secrets,Deba tries to protect Ria and slowly,Ria reciprocates his feelings. How the two manage to reach their goal makes for the rest of the story.

The novelty of Jaaneman apart from its trite Hindi title jaaneman does not exist in the Bengali lexicon is that the entire film unfolds on the road. After Dui Prithibi,this is the first road movie that had tremendous potential for excitement but falls short. The Bengali audience,by now,has wearied of the repetitive song-dance numbers; shot this time in Switzerland. The disco song naichaibo sounds hilarious and out-of-place against the beautiful Switzerland backdrop. While Sham needs to shed much of his extra weight and hone his dancing skills,Koel turns the tables on the rest of the cast and the flimsy storyline with the pull of her glamour and her spontaneity she has achieved after tremendous hard work. Her dress sense is perhaps the best in the industry and adds to her star value and screen charisma. Ashish Vidyarthy as an actor with the baggage of his NSD training is a ghost of his former self he proved so well in Govind Nihalanis Drohkaal.

Jeet Gangullys title song is good and the I Love You number resonates romance too. But one has heard better scores from him in other films. Raja Chanda had a good story going but with a focus that gets split between romance on the one hand and action on the other,after a point of time,he seems to lose control over the film,if not on the action. The cinematography and the editing jell very well with the films format and frame as the respective directors do their job efficiently.

RATINGS : The three stars are for Koel Mullick,for Jeet Gangullys music and for the entertainment value of the film.