Homecoming movie review: Soumyajit Majumdar’s buddy-drama drowns itself in pretentious artistic excesses

Language: English, Hindi, Bengali 

Soumyajit Majumdar’s #Homecoming is the kind of film that speaks only in one language: unfocused nostalgia. There’s a longing for the past, the present, and even the future lingering in every moment of the 90-minute film. It’s meant to look and sound effortlessly profound — the protagonists frequently ruminate on the purity of art, its commodification, the relationship of an artist with his city, and the worrying culture of mediocrity. But the film, stuck between a carefree gaze and a self-conscious voice, never quite manages to reach a state of profundity. As a result, #Homecoming is rendered airless and bland, rarely able to justify its idealism or really, convince a viewer why exactly they should care.

Set in Kolkata during the month of Durga Puja, the film revolves around five friends who once used to be part of a youth theatre group. When they reunite seven years later, the theatre that witnessed their artistic coming-of-age is on the verge of being converted into a heritage hotel. For the five friends, who have all attempted to begin anew in different cities away from each other, the reunion becomes a way for them to connect to each other, their commitment to art, and to their shared past.

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Directed, written, and produced by Majumdar, #Homecoming, his debut effort, trains its lens on the mini-stories that exist within a larger story. In here, the story is a simple one — five individuals remember what it really means to be a part of a community. That 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.

Unfolding in Hindi, English, and Bengali, #Homecoming doesn’t have much by way of a plot — characters in the film find themselves in endless conversations that make up the film. None of it goes anywhere or boasts any purpose [A sample: “Why don’t you use emoticons in your poems? It’s like punctuation now.” Or “Have you ever kissed somebody with a lipjob?”]

Without narrative plot points, it becomes clear after a point that the film really doesn’t have many answers to the deeply intellectual questions it frequently poses.

For this exact reason, much of the film struggles to have a voice or take any risks, rendering itself one-note and reactionary. It’s the equivalent of someone having a one-sided conversation with themselves.

Even then, indulging a movie that revolves largely around emotional malaise would have been an easier sell had the film sketched its protagonists as layered, interesting personalities. The five protagonists in #Homecoming aren’t exactly the most memorable bunch and come out looking self-serious and unnecessarily glum.

The film assigns a hashtag descriptor [#Canteen_Rockstar, #Breaking_Barriers] to almost every character in the film which caricatures them further instead of familiarising a viewer with their quirks.

If that’s not enough, Majumdar also adopts a relentless pace in introducing the secondary cast to the mix, without pausing to either build their characters or afford them any complexity. It’s why even by the end of the film, Majumdar is unable to conjure any chemistry between the central five. It’s another matter altogether that #Homecoming features one of the most ineffective casting in recent times that goes against it. Most of the actors in the film say their dialogue as if they’re talking down to people rather than talking to them. A number of scenes appear awkward and abrupt, a testament to Majumdar’s inability to steer an ensemble or infuse it with humour. His focus seems to instead be on neat resolutions: In #Homecoming, a change of heart is always around the corner.

In that sense, Majumdar’s screenplay is the weakest link. Much of it unfolds as a spoken-word piece with exposition-heavy lines (One character’s job seems to just be spelling out every emotion that anyone is feeling in the film). It is prone to simultaneously being verbose, melodramatic, preachy, and emotionally handicapped. Every plot point in the film feels eerily disconnected with the rest of the film. And the plot turns remain contrived and convenient — the filmmaker earns practically no moment in the film. Even a climactic tragedy feels shoehorned in just so the filmmaker could get shots of morose faces to force the idea of sadness down our throats. For a film so invested with feeling, #Homecoming really struggles to make a viewer feel anything.

[caption id=“attachment_10385951” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Stills from #Homecoming[/caption]

The filmmaking choices seem to always be compensating for its narrative incompleteness. For instance, the idea of a film within a film is deployed so childishly that it is laughable. And throughout the film, we’re repeatedly told about the significance of the plays that the group would put up — how it inspired an entire generation of storytellers. But at no point does the film actually decide to show any of it save for some generic flashback montages of youthful exuberance. The film is nothing without the first-hand knowledge of the people these five people were back then, the talents they used to possess, and the origins of their interpersonal dynamics. Even Majumdar’s approach of intercutting the present with flashbacks of the group’s creatively-involved youth doesn’t do much to hide the film’s nothingness.

I will say though that Majumdar does an admirable job of exploiting the reputation of Bengalis as disapproving intellectuals in #Homecoming. Almost all of the things that people say to each would have sounded pretentious if this was set in any other city and centered around a different community. But revolving a story about Bengalis allows the filmmaker a solid ground to indulge in his grand ideas of cultural superiority. Except the trouble is that, the film still comes off looking pretentious and condescending, simply because it has no interest in rising above the prison of its own mediocrity. It’s the kind of movie whose existence you forget about the moment you finish watching it.

#Homecoming is streaming on SonyLIV.

Rating: 2/5

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter.

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