No magic here

Life is magic. You are here this minute and gone the next. This is a line a character in Ekti Tarar Khonje says...

Ekti Tara KhonjeProducers: Aniruddha Roychoudhury,Indrani Mukherjee and Jeet Banerjee
Direction and Cinematography: Avik Mukherjee

Life is magic. You are here this minute and gone the next. This is a line a character in Ekti Tarar Khonje says. This is a pithy one-liner that defines the film. It is about the journey of Abhishek (Shayan Munshi),a shy and introvert young man from small town in search of fame,glamour and money in the big bad city of Kolkata. He wants to become an actor.
The journey gets skewed when he realises he has the rare gift of foreseeing the deaths of people. As he steps in front of the camera playing the negative second lead in a crime thriller,his screen role and his real life get strangely entwined and he finds himself sucked into a dangerous world he cannot get out of. A don who heads an agency for drug-running,contract killing,etc. with a signature modus-operandi for murder,takes a fancy to Abhishek when he has a premonition of the dons death and saves him from an accident.

The dons right hand guy,Ganga (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) tempts him with a heavy pay packet. His love affair with Rani (Arpita Chatterjee),the niece of Ananda Babu (Dhritiman Chatterjee),the landlord is threatened by his unwitting involvement in crime.
Technical expertise often has a perennial argument with the content of a film. Filmmakers try to achieve a harmonious balance between the two. Sometimes,for a debutant director,it could become a fight between these two priorities. This is precisely what goes wrong with Avik Mukherjees directorial debut film Ekti Tarar Khonje. It is alright to explore multiple perspectives in a narrative. But it is really an uphill task to get these perspectives in place without placing the audience in a tizzy.

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The mafia don with a skull cap is captured in shadowy silhouettes to add to the mystery. But one identifies him at once,the voice distortion notwithstanding. Two killings by the dons henchmen fail to excite because they are forced,specially the cold-blooded strangling of the young gay boy in a metro station. Abhishek daydreams a lot. He also has flashes of sixth sense. These tend to blur so much that after a point,we cannot tell the one from the other. Some characters such as Revati Bhushan,Rama Pishi and Nabadwip Halder remain unexplored and shallow. The commercial insertions of the skin-care clinic and the jewellery house are miserably artificial and forced.

The best part is the no-nonsense,forthright,natural yet romantic love that blooms between Abhishek and Rani. Admit your love for me in English, says the straightforward and pragmatic Rani,and the audience laughs for once. Ranis Tagore song Shokhi bhabona kahara bole (Jayati Charaborty) sung against the backdrop of the Diwali-lit night on the terrace is beautiful.

Prabuddha Banerjees musical score and the moving lyrics are mind-blowing and despite the films counter-narrative approach,give it the semblance of a story. Shayan Munshi is very good as the shy,naive but determined young man unrelenting on his principles yet unable to extricate himself from the web of crime. Arpita Chatterjee as Rani is sparklingly fresh and no-nonsense in her approach to life,love and relationships. One fails to understand why she avoids her uncle Ananda Babu like the plague. Dhritiman as Ananda Babu is good in the intellectual dimension of his character. The rest,including Rudraneel are strictly okay.
Mukherjee excels in his innovative technique. He gets the best out of his infrastructural support in Arghya Kamal Mitras editing that matches the shifting paces of the film. His cinematography is more technically brilliant than meaningful. The production design is very good too. But what is the point of a film where the director does not know what story he wants to tell? The two stars are strictly for the music and the acting.