Ley Chakka: A review

Reviewing a mainstream Bengali film has always been difficult, especially one with no pretensions. While a harsh review would be a show of laughable pedantry, a reviewer worth his salt can't possibly shower praises on such a film. The golden mean in this case would be to analyse what the film in question promised to deliver and whether or not it had been able to do it.

Raj Chakraborty's fourth feature Ley Chakka is everything that a crowd pleaser ought to be: it has a romance plot, offers a plenitude of song, dance and slapstick humour, has a popular pair in the lead and takes the religion of cricket as a plot device. Coming from a director who sounds unabashedly populist ("If I were to make a film on a Tagore story, I'd gladly commercialise it," Raj once told me), Ley Chakka's utter lack of artiness and overt use of the mainstream paraphernalia is not so much a shocker as a clear pointer to Raj's professional debt to his older contemporaries. Like them, Raj is content with making potboilers that offer a complete entertainment package to an audience fed on Bollywood diet.

But is Ley Chakka in the same league of Bengali films as those profusely manufactured in the '90s and early 2000s?

Any attempt at answering this question would, in turn, beg the question as to if those films from the earlier decades could at all attract a significant number of urban viewers. For the directors of these films, the target audience was the vast multitude of rural viewers who enjoyed seeing bad actors deliver silly dialogues in unnecessarily lengthy tearjerkers. While retaining some of these inalienable features like bad acting, silly dialogues, funny "action" and a faulty storyline, Raj has given a sleek look to his film by doing away with melodrama and tethering the story to the city as we know it.

Born and brought up in south Kolkata, Abir (Dev) reluctantly moves into a north Kolkata tenement after his nostalgic father (Biswajit Chakraborty) plans to revisit his childhood spent in old Kolkata. As he tries to come to terms with his new surroundings – which include, among other things and people, rivalry from a group of cricket-crazy para youths – Abir falls in love with Rani (Payel), the chirpy, bespectacled niece of his landlord (Dipankar Dey). When a politician eyes the building to erect a shopping complex in its place, he challenges the crook to a cricket match: if Abir's team lose, the building and the land are to become the politician's property; but if his team win, the politician is to leave the locality for good. Not unexpectedly, Abir wins even though his team is composed mostly of hilarious wimps.

Its vague similarity with Lagaan notwithstanding, Padmanava Dasgupta's story of Ley Chakka is refreshingly new, dealing as it does with the north Kolkata tradition of gully cricket. However, the director, in his infinite wisdom, introduces several stock characters and themes that seem to have no bearing on the central story. The supposed mainstay of the film – the cricket match between north Kolkata and south Kolkata, with Abir's Ghoti north beating the Bangal south – comes at the end, keeping alive the audience's brouhaha till the credits start rolling.

One thing Ley Chakka proves is that the average Bengali audience is crazy about Dev. His stubbled, ripped jeans-clad look of the angry yet romantic young man has a strong sway over young viewers. Each word he utters (in an unclear accent and with a slight lisp) elicits whistles of excitement from his fans. But the great excitement he creates is belied by the truth that he should go back to a good acting school to learn the basics. Though Payel's Rani is more acceptable than Dev's Abir, the director makes the rest of the cast play second fiddle to his hero.

Ley Chakka is destined to be a big hit like Raj's first three films. It tells an urban story in a new style sans too many tears. One word of caution, though: Abandon your critical faculty all ye who venture to see Dev hit a sixer.


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