Antaheen: Bangla Movie Review

With high expectations after the success of his first film Anuranan, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s second directorial venture, Antaheen (The Endless Wait) is a labour of love blended with pleasant colours and heart-warming moments that can make even the most cynical heart melt like wax.

Antaheen is special in the sense that it makes every person to yearn for a little more, to take time off from the fast-paced urban lives and share few moments with yourself. And if there is one person who deserves credit for making the film so close to your heart, it has to be cinematographer Abhik Mukherjee who has easily surpassed himself with this film, be it with something as trivial as the rain splashed window panes or the elegant city by night that could be made to look oh so beautiful!

Antaheen opens with a Bond-type Kolkata cop, Avik Chowdhury (Rahul Bose), an IPS officer based in Kolkata raiding a den of anti-socials and retrieving a huge cache of arms and ammunition. The movie cuts to a scene in a television studio where an investigative television journalist (aka Barkha Dutt style), Brinda Roy Menon, (Radhika Apte) trying to get lead into the Breaking News of the hour.

Avik is honest, upright, yet laidback with a thoughtful heart and stays with his aunt Moni Pishi (Sharmila Tagore). Brinda is a young, dynamic television journalist, a rising star, who comes from a conventional middle-class home, with her parents living in Durgapur steel township. After work both Avik and Brinda tries to seek some kind of emotional bonding from the virtual world by striking up an online connection with each other and here they develops a intense relationship, more real than virtual without knowing anything about their real names and whereabouts. Both waits to chat every night with their ‘raat jaga tara’ or, ‘the night-star who keeps awake’ and with both being strangers, they just strike the right chord.

Soon enough they also come close to each other in the real world, but without realising that they have been virtual partners as well. What follows is a kind of double timing, interesting maze of situations and emotional entanglements. While this relationship blossoms within the confines of two computer screens, Avik gets his six minutes of fame on national television, when he successfully masterminds a raid on a consignment of illegal arms. Brinda telephones him to ask for an on-camera interview, but Avik declines, stating that did not want to sensationalize the event any further.

Ranjan (Kalyan Ray, Aparna Sen’s husband in real life) and Paromita (Aparna Sen) become the bridge between Brinda and Avik. Ranjan, a stock market addict is Avik’s cousin, but he is more a friend, philosopher and guide. Ranjan is as acutely sensitive and perceptive as he is bitter and cynical on the surface. Paromita (Paro to friends and colleagues), is a senior marketing executive with the channel where Brinda is a colleague and a friend.

Things take a different turn at Ranjan’s birthday party, which is secretly organised as a surprise by Paro when Brinda and Avik bump into each other and start developing a grudging interest. At the party, Brinda and Avik get to know each other a little better. The mood of the party turns romantic yet poignant with Paro singing Ranjan’s favourite song at his insistence.

Avik confides in Ranjan that he is probably falling in love, although he does not know with whom. In the virtual world of the Internet though, Brinda and Avik’s online chatting continues unabated, even though their identities remain undisclosed. The narrative weaves through party circuits/social gatherings and a host of characters.

At work, Brinda hits a stumbling block while doing an investigative story on a controversial mega El Dorado project an entrepreneur, Vijay Ketan Mehra (Souvik Kundogrami). It happens during the launch of of the project, Brinda overhears a piece of conversation between two men about Mehra’s project. This gives her a lead to a potentially big scoop.

At this point, she turns to Avik for help. Brinda notices some uncanny similarities between Avik and her anonymous chat friend, in the way they talk, and in their choice of phrase. Something about Avik reminds her of her online friend. As she follows the leads given by Avik, she manages to get an important interview lined up which can give her the proof she needs to wrap up her story. The night before her interview, a particular phone conversation with Avik strikes her. She gets onto the net, and tells her chat friend that they should meet.
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Antaheen is sensitively narrated story. There is love in the first drops of rain which drench the Kolkata horizon; there is love in the heavy shower which splashes the glass panes; there is love in a random sight such as a kite stuck to a roof antenna. The film through its characters offers brief glimpses into the varied faces of the city. While Antaheen can be accused of being high emotional, it also portrays real life moments with equal ease. The final scenes shot inside Brinda's home, with her mother shot in the shade, are more telling because they do not have any dialogue.

The screen, painted rather than cinematographed by Abhik Mukherjee's magic camera, is soaked with technological innovations of contemporary urban life such as the cell-phone, the television set, the laptop, the internet connection, the chat-room, juxtaposed against the poetry of a surprise birthday party organised by Paromita for Ranjan, the home lit with candles of all shapes and sizes, Brinda's home a picture of aesthetic blends of Frida Kahlo, artifacts, odds and ends and a beautiful, slightly opaque glass screen with a love-poem by the Persian poet Rumi scribbled across, awash with the rains when she sings out lines of poetry beautifully penned by Chandril and Anindyo of Chandrabindoo. Moni Pishi's home is simple but artistic.

The strong cast of performers as an ensemble is brilliant with the film holding its forte. The acting and the dialogues by Radhika Apte, Kalyan Ray, Aparna Sen and Rahul Bose does not feel out of place. Instead, it feels Bangla cinema has always been intended to be this way- modern, contemporary, lively and brilliant.

Rahul Bose as Avik Choudhury, a modern day cop who is very much at ease with tackling arms dealer as much as giving press con appearances is an introvert who’d rather retreat to virtual chat-rooms talking to his hidden self. The most sparklingly natural performance comes from debutante Radhika Apte as Brinda which is like a breath of fresh air.

What works best here is the duo of real life couple – Aparna Sen and Kalyan Ray as Paro and Ranjan. Paro as the marketing head of a television channel who shares a special bond with Radhika plays her character to the hilt. But her real life husband is simply brilliant and spontaneous as the laidback financial consultant who whales away time dabbling with shares online and indulging in expensive foreign liquor.

The film’s characters are shaded and are rounded off with romance, poetry, music, subtle lines of dialogue seeping out of every pore. Sharmila Tagore proves yet again that age does mellow one's performing abilities stripping off the mannerisms one acquires with stardom.

Everything about Antaheen feels of being international cinema. The ambience, the lights, the laid back dialogues, the silent scenes and the high emotional quotient and not to forget the impeccable cinematography by Avik Mukherjee with riveting shots of Kolkata, with some of them taken at night and from great heights, and they give an ethereal feel to the city. Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury presents a movie that is fascinatingly mounted and narrated through arresting images, with his strong advertising background to give support.

Writer Shyamal Sengupta’s narrative shuffles between characters and it is their individual slices of life that build the streamlines which finally coalesce to the larger story arc. And Director Anirudhha Roy Chowdhury aces in that. Arghyakamal Mitra's editing is as lyrical as the low-key, romantic musical score of Shantanu Moitra with the very melodious Shreya Ghoshal to give voice. Chandril and Anindyo's lyrics are against their regular beat and prove their ability to infuse mood. Pherari mon and Jao pakhi tracks that played in the background superbly conveyed the unsaid and enriched the film, and have helped the director to say what he wants to say.

National Award winning Best Film, Antaheen is indeed one of the finest that Bengali cinema has produced in the last couple of years. In the post-Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen era, at one point of time, it appeared that the enormous responsibility of keeping alive Bengal’s rich heritage of motion pictures would fall on Buddhadeb Dasgupta, though Rituparno Ghosh and now Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury hold out hope. The contribution of Bengali movies is immense which are artistically made and target the elite.

There is just something about beautiful movies that makes them so effortlessly loveable.


You can listen/watch/download the complete music and the movie of this beautiful film here.

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