Review of Homecoming with pics

The story of Sowmyajit Majumdar’s debut film Homecoming is set in Kolkata and Majumdar, who has acted in Bengali films like “Family Album”, “Har Har Byomkesh”, and “Kiriti Roy”, sets out to display the city of Kolkata in its truest form in his directorial debut. Majumdar’s film trains its lens on the several mini-stories that exist within a larger story. In here, the story is a simple one and it is essentially about five individuals who set out to remember what it really means to be a part of the same community.

This, by itself, acts as the backdrop against which the several mini-lives collide: a homesick NRI (Soham Majumdar) deepening his roots in Kolkata; two estranged lovers (Sayani Gupta, Hussain Dalal) finding their way back to each other; an outsider (Plabita Borthakur) finding herself among like-minded souls; and an artist (Tushar Pandey) trying to rise above his self-induced misery. Unfortunately for the viewer, though the film unfolds in Hindi, English, and Bengali, #Homecoming hardly has anything cohesive by way of a plot — characters in the film find themselves in endless conversations that make up the film.

The film begins with Sri (Sayani Gupta), once a lead actor of Amra but now a disillusioned poster girl of ‘alternate’ Bangla Cinema, and Imroze aka #canteen rockstar, once a singer and music director at Amra, and now an equally disillusioned singer in the Hindi film circuit, awkwardly bumping into each other in their secret place of rendezvous. It is their catharsis that makes them bond once again.

The biggest problem of the half-baked film is that it comes off looking pretentious and condescending, simply because it has no interest in rising above the prison of its own sheer mediocrity and what’s more, it’s the kind of movie whose existence you will forget about the moment you finish watching it. The screenplay by itself is a big let-down. The absurdity of the narration where each scene is good in silos but abrupt and disconnected with the very next scene throws the viewer off guard, and thus it is very painful to watch the film, whose saving grace is that it has a duration of just about 90 minutes.

As far as the performances of the actors are concerned to the credit of the director, each and every actor delivers a robust performance, sincerely. Standing out among them all are Tushart Pandey, Sayani Gupta and last but not the least Hussain Dalal. Mention also ought to be made of the brilliant background score by Neil Mukherjee, which elevates the proceedings of the film effectively, though the film is by itself very experimental and complex to the core and may not appeal to the lowest common denominator, because the screenplay seems to be missing!