User Reviews

Utopia is the last thing you expect to see in a Bangla parallel film. In Mondo Meyer Upakhyan, the director creates utopia in a brothel with all its greed, lust and longing, and almost manages to convinces you that utopia is real, dreams are still worth chasing, and wishes are fulfilled, even today. The movie is set in a desolate village setting, where everyone is doomed to his or her own chains: rich old Paladhi trapped in his lonely lust as symbolized in the opening shot where he is watching pornography alone in his private theatre, Rajani, the past-prime prostitute (Rituparna) who wants to see her daughter happy but does not know how to (the world seems to have only the cinema hall and the brothel and a vast expanse of arid land), Lata, her daughter, a keen student who is desperate to escape her fate of getting married to Paladhi to which her birth in a brothel seems to have bound her, and Tapas Pal (in a very unlikely, convincing performance), is a rough-talking do-gooder who is bound as Paladhi's hired driver to take him to his rendezvous with Lata. The story is one of everyone breaking free of his chains and embarking on a journey…the news of man's journey to the moon comes as a vindication that anything is possible. Tapas Pal picks up a very old couple in one of his trips and wanders around aimlessly in search of a hospital. He is essentially looking for a home for them: they find it in his car, and finally, in a very contented game of Ludo under a tree. The girl Lata defies her destiny and finally makes off to Kolkata for her education. There are these three other prostitutes who find support in each other (a hint of lesbianism?) and make off boldly to the uncertainty of the outside world. And Paladhi too is happy, shifting the object of his desire from Lata, the unattainable, to Rajani, the compliant. So, every wish is granted, and the viewer has his lost childhood faith in fairy tales restored.

A rather sad film that is contemplative in many ways but it reflects the impossible dream of the West that underdeveloped countries should never develop. Here is India in 1969 when the first man walked on the moon. We know what has happened since then. The unfettered development of India in an unexpected field based on the desire to learn and work of the untouchables. They could only learn vocational trades and they did, computer science and we know what they are doing with it. The first ever computing workshop in the world serving the whole world and controlling the whole world with its computing dexterity. No, definitely no , third world countries do not want to keep their traditional way of living that rhymes with prostitution in this film, no hospitals, except for cows in this film, no studying for girls except the bawdy songs of a whore-house, of a brothel. We can in the West always dream, that will not happen. They want change, development, knowledge, know how, a future in one word and not a present tied up to a past. The best part about it is that in the west we have exactly the same dream and exactly the same people tell us that dream is not possible, we have to limit our ambitions. We have to say with Barack Obama, we want the American dream for everyone, and not the American nightmare or any perverted version of this dream of a world governance of the peoples, from the peoples and by the peoples. This film is an admirable vision of this irrepressible urgency of now as Martin Luther King would have said, and God only knows how irrepressible this emergency is now. So let's seize the day and run to the train to Calcutta and start a new life at the passage gate between the silk road from Tibet and the world.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines