CHAURANGA - A typical festival film on rural India with nothing new, especially for the viewers well familiar with the art-cinema wave of the 70s and 80s. [TTP (To the Point) Review By Bobby Sing]

Directed by debutant Bikas Mishra, CHAURANGA seems to be a typical ‘rural India based film’ particularly made for the festival audience instead of the general public to be straight. Though it boldly showcases the ages old awful realities of caste system, social divide, exploitation and spiritual manipulation widely prevalent in the rural India, yet the film never turns out to be any powerful presentation at all and fails to make any kind of worth mentioning statement over the specific subject in its less than 100 minutes of duration.

Supported by fine performers such as Sanjay Suri, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Tannishtha Chatterjee and a few young actors, the director tries to rope in a subtle love story too amongst all the tension around which doesn’t contribute a lot. No doubt a couple of sequences do stand out conveying the terrifying exploitation and ignorance practiced in such backward regions (especially the ones having the cunning blind priest in focus), but the film remains unable to generate any major hard hitting impact overall.

The pace remains slow and the progression remains dull with the narration missing the much required continuous flow moving towards an effective climax. Besides the content doesn’t offer anything fresh or never seen before, especially for the viewers who are well familiar with the art-cinema wave of the 70s and 80s (reminding you of the directors such as Shyam Benegal, Prakash Jha, Mrinal Sen and more)

Having said that CHAURANGA still provides two eye opener conclusions for the thinking viewers:
First – This kind of ugly, backward India still exists in the remote villages (similar to what was portrayed in the 70s and 80s), which clearly reveals that we haven’t really progressed in collective or actual terms at all in the last four decades.
Second – At one end they deliberately make such off-beat films for the festivals audience to be shown without any ticket price charged, but on the other expect the general public to spend more than 300 Rupees on them buying an insanely costly multiplex ticket revealing the double standard.

In all, CHAURANGA doesn’t give you anything exceptional in its own specific genre. So you can easily skip it for something else, even when it gets aired on a TV channel next in the coming months.

Rating : 2 / 5