Via Darjeeling

Rating : 3/10
Running Time : 103 Minutes
Release Date : 27th June ‘08
Director : Arindam Nandy ; Writer : Arindam Nandy & Atul Sabharwal ; Music : Prabuddha Banerjee
Starring : Vinay Pathak, Kay Kay Menon, Sonali Kulkarni, Sandhya Mridul, Rajat Kapoor, Prroshant Narayannan, Parvin Dabas, Simone Singh

What happened here ? Its definitely something different, something unusual for Hindi cinema. I kept sitting through a movie that while boasting of an excellent star cast, clearly lacked zip in its dialogue and was moving at a soporific pace, hoping that the ending would surprise us all and make the whole journey worthwhile. No such luck, it only contributed to making my heavy head become a full-fledged throbbing headache….

The premise is that of a husband vanishing (shades of Frantic in reverse here)on the last day of their honeymoon. The inspector is not able to make any headway and later is ordered to kind of be hands off by the rich and powerful father of the bride and also the chief inspector / DIG of the region.
So one rainy night, at a house gathering with some very drunk and some barely sober friends, he mentions this case and all the others take a crack at trying to figure out what happened. The theories get more and more weird, some intersect with reality (but in a kind of blurry way, so you’re not really sure whether it was fact or fiction), some are pure concoctions fuelled by the number of drinks poured into the narrator.

The movie, in any case, would live or die by its ending and I felt cheated at the end. It was unintentionally funny and lead to much mirth and merriment amongst the 50odd people watching it in the hall. The laughter was more at ourselves, the kind where you laugh at how you’ve been taken for a fool. It’s the kind of film which drives you straight into the cold embrace of a frothy beer, so in the overall scheme of things, it still ends well…