Bow Barracks Forever - must-see story about redemption

By Subhash K. Jha, IndiaFM

Cast: Lilette Dubey, Victor Bannerjee, Moon Moon Sen, Sabyasachi

Chakbraborty, Neha Dubey, Clayton Rodgers

Directed by: Anjan Dutt

Trust Pritish Nandy's production house to give that crucial thrust to

deserving cinema. Sure, Writer-director Anjan Dutt's second release in two

weeks (after the tepidly –received Bong Connection) is not as powerful

and poignant a portrait of the rapidly-disintegrating Anglo-Indian

community in Kolkata as Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringee Lane.

The earlier film had a hauntingly intimate quality to its tragic theme of a

woman's solitude and emotional exploitation. Bow Barracks Forever is

more rumbustious raunchy and scathing. The spoken word is constantly

harsh and the songs (composed partly by the director) cheer up only for a

few seconds.

Largely the narrative scans the dilapidated tenement with ruthless

directness. A lack of romantic yearning is also the presence of a captivating

candour in the narration. The more the director looks into these desperate

lives for anguished statements, the less representational they seem in their

communalized seclusion.

What the saucy screenplay lacks is a kind of subtlety. The characters

are as broadly bravura as they are uninhibited in their expressions of geo-

political indignance. Perhaps the 'ideas' tend to swamp the emotions at

times. The one tenement in Anjan Dutt's plot seems to encompass

characters of every shape and size, from the over-sexed rebellious

housewife(Moon Moon Sen, in full-blown form) to the battered wife(Neha

Dubey, more hysterical than required)….from the footloose moorless boy

(Clayton Rodgers) who sneaks into the battered wife's bed to his strong-

and-dignified mother(Lilette Dubey) who continues to believe that her elder

son will summon her to Australia although he hasn't spoken to her for four

years.

These are 'real' people given that cinematic tweak which separates the

mannequins from the flesh-and-blood types. The cinematography by

Indranil Mukherjee invests these derelicts with a life beyond the womb of

the screenplay. The editing, though, could have been crisper. Some of the

situations tend to get aggressively monotonous. And you wonder, is the

monotony a symptom of the characters' lives, or is that simply an imagined

virtue?

And what pray tell, was the planted pre-interval murder in loo, if not a

ploy to get the audience back in their seats quickly from the loo?

Somewhere towards the end the gifted Roopa Ganguly shows up as an

abandoned wife seeking solace from the abandoned husband. Such

geometrical gyrations do not take away from the distinctly cutting edge in

the plot.

The skyline of the screem-play is ceaselessly scattered with salacious

tidbits. Love-making scenes come on with energetic emphasis to remind us

derelict lives needn't be dull. The juices and aromas from the kitchen and

bedroom hit your senses in perpetual motions.

Standing tall and statately at the center of this awry universe of

disoriented fringe- people is Lilette Dubey. What an actor! No Violet

Stonehem from 36 Chowringhee Lane, Lilette plays her character with

delicious abandon. And yet there's a restrain and dignity in her gait and

language, quite like what Shabana Azmi had created in her lonely Anglo-

Indian character in Anjan Dutt's Bada Din.

The other imposing performance comes from the irrepressible Victor

Banerjee. After seeing him do his ho-hum two-bit in two Hindi films Tara

Rum Pum and Apne it's a joy to watch Victor emerge victorious as the

twinkle-eyed sodden trumpet player who chuckles loudly in the face of

adversity and asks the Lilette character for a li'l kiss ("No real smooch or

anything") just to remind you that life goes on….come what may. Another

tale of inspirational deprivation? Not quite. Bow Barracks Forever takes the

marginal stereotypes by the b…lls and turns them into something distinctly

glorious, if not grand.

A must-see for those who love stories about tribulation and

redemption. They don't make films about such characters with such

ironical integrity any more.