A couple is struggling to make ends meet after Covid. The man, Raktim (Shilajit), has lost his job due to some fraud he has been wrongly accused of at a private bank. A harsh modern reality, no doubt, though just retrenchment would have sufficed since these fraud details are never explained. Anyway, he drinks even in the morning (bad sign, bad sign) while his wife Parna (Rituparna) dutifully makes the morning cup of tea and looks for a job (shades of Mahanagar?) to help tide over the financial crisis that has suddenly befallen them. She soon lands one where the boss is good and makes the right noises.

Raktim is now a house husband, getting their little daughter with a detective foot ready for school and generally taking care of the household with house help. But he hates it. He finds himself hemmed in. He hits the bar on Park Street on most nights (despite an EMI on a flat he is tied to, it has to be only single malt). He gets into nasty fights with bartenders who shortchange his drink; whether they do it deliberately or otherwise, we have no clue. Suddenly, what looks like a chance meeting with a stranger, Prosen (without the jit, who is played by Prosenjit), at that same bar, and you have guessed it correctly, a love triangle unfolds. But this is no ordinary triangle. There is a twist.

Prosen, for all his suaveness, is a man with a troubled past. We get frequent flashes of a disturbing visual of an elderly man being strapped to the railway tracks and a speeding train running over him. While this is no thriller, these serve as red herrings to a plot that we wait for it to unveil with bated breath. Is he really the good Samaritan trying to help Raktim and Parna?

In the second half of the film, we get the answers, but it proves to be so underwhelming that, as a viewer, you are bound to feel totally shortchanged.

Kaushik Ganguly, the director of Ajogyo, is known to make sensitive films like Khaad, Shobdo, etc., but the Covid hiatus has not really resulted in a good script. The secret that Prasen and Parna nursed in their hearts could have been played out in different ways and not necessarily at Puri, because even if Gopi Bhagat’s camera does capture the vast sea in all its moods and colours, Joy Jagannath as the deus ex machina makes one squirm.

As far as the acting goes, Shilajit gives a natural performance, while Prosenjit looks pretty well-preserved for his age. Rituparna plays a very soft middle-class mother; she never once raises her voice, despite the tension. Maybe this drags the film a bit as far as action is concerned.

At a stretch, the film could be called a love story in the backdrop of political turmoil, as one of the fathers we learn was a communist and the other an industrialist, so I am guessing a capitalist. Is this meant to be a love story against political turmoil in a small town in Bengal? It is not fleshed out.

This is a simple tale of middle-class heroism and unpleasant secrets, which can surely be so wonderful if handled well. The director loses his touch in this one, just as the hit pair of Prasenjit and Rituparna from a certain era fails to create that magic once more. This is, by the way, their 50th film together. The insipid dialogues and quips that Bumba Da was known for in his commercial films in the 80’s are somewhat transcreated here, especially the ones he has with his mother, the dear old Lily Chakraborty. In this context and especially in the year 2024, these do not work.

So are we checking off a checklist here or using good money to make a robust film? To write something original, one has to just look around for stories. The Bengali bhadro samaj can still give us stories, or we can dip into our rich literary reservoir. The true meaning of the film—what is suitability or unsuitability in love?—is hidden in the usual beautiful lyrics of the songs in the film, but the overriding feeling is that of being shortchanged by that peg measure at every step, including the music.