Tui Shudhu Amar movie review: Joydeep Mukherjee's film is a sordid mess of glitter and glamour sans logic

All that glitters – they say – is not gold. Glitter and glamour are beautiful things. In cinema, especially in commercial cinema, glamour has its own share of importance. But glamour can be dangerous too – most certainly so if it is not accompanied by meaningful content. There is no better example to illustrate this than director Joydeep Mukherjee’s recent Indo-Bangla joint production Tui Shudhu Amar, which is such a sordid mess of glitter and glamour sans logic and sense that it is bound to leave you with a frustrating headache. [caption id=“attachment_5189311” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  A still from Tui Shudhu Amar. YouTube[/caption] The film’s plot – if one could call it that – is the following. A young man named Piku (do not be confused – in Bengal, Piku can be a boy’s or a girl’s name) and a young woman named Priya are trying to secure an advertising deal with a multinational company, one of whose many businesses is jewellery, and whose sole proprietor, Aditya Singh Raj, is an eligible bachelor. While Piku aims to be the creative head on the ad, he is desperately trying to recommend his friend Priya’s name as the model for the same. The entire team is invited to London, where Ray meets Priya and Piku, and immediately falls for Priya. However, Piku seems to have an ulterior motive – and apparently, he is trying to use his girlfriend Priya to get to Ray’s enormous fortune. Trouble is, there might be a chance that his honey-trap – the beautiful Priya – is falling in love with her mark. There is not a single original idea in Mukherjee’s film. You read this right – not a single one. What is worse, every single idea in the film has been done to death before. Technically too, the film has nothing new to offer. The music comes and goes, and you do not feel the least bit moved in any manner. The choreography belongs to the previous decade. The story does not seem to go anywhere. And almost everyone overacts. True to the formula of all masala films, there are two comedians thrown in for comic relief, but they fail to induce even a single  genuine chuckle. Most of the scenes – including the very mood and blocking of the scenes – seem like we are watching a television soap opera. My heartfelt congratulations to the cinematographer though. The way the film has been glossed up is a lesson to be learnt in itself. The female lead, for instance, is one of Bangladesh’s most popular actresses, Mahiya Mahi. She has had to wear such heavy layers of makeup that if she would have looked any fairer, she would have merged with the background of the sky. The attire of each and every character is spotless, impeccably neat and clean. This almost seems like a make-believe world – a world which exists only in the magical kingdom of cinema. Coming to the screenplay, consider a scene, for instance, and judge for yourself. Said heroine has come to London for said shoot. She mistakes the business tycoon for a common man and gives him a piece of her mind (and is conveniently exonerated later because she bites her forefinger in apology). Has the tycoon – our hero – forgiven her? Nope, not so easy. Conflict and chaos, remember? The tycoon tells the damsel that he would forgive her on one condition. She would have to – hold your breath – cook a perfect Bengali meal for him. I rest my case. To tell you the truth, the entire film is full of such childish scenes. How they have been stitched together to form a jarring concoction – which is being claimed as cinema – I fail to understand. And it does not help that the acting is so deplorably bad. Mahiya plays Priya – the dolled up glam girl who has so little range that she is literally incapable of summoning any expression to her face other than a look that could convey any emotion – wholesale. So, whether she is happy, or sad, or angry, or sorry, or sleepy – she looks exactly the same. Her diction needs serious work and she has the worst dubbing skills among all the three lead actors. I cannot comment on her dancing skills because the camera was so busy objectifying her that it felt like the director did not care whether there was any art involved in her dancing. Raja Goswami Om plays a negative character in the film. The preceding sentence is not a spoiler because Om himself made a big thing about it in the media as part of the promotional strategy of the film. And this is exactly what happens when you give more importance to something than it deserves – you tend to overdo it. Om flexes his facial muscles, gnashes his teeth and gives intense Gulshan Grover-type looks, without realising that not everyone who is evil has to look evil. Soham Chakraborty commits the least of the blunders. One can tell that he has submitted himself entirely in the hands of his director and that the latter has literally shred his role to pieces. I actually felt somewhat sorry for him and I have a feeling that given enough creative freedom, a sufficiently skilled filmmaker will be able to extract a good performance out of him. I say this with confidence because I have seen Chakraborty in Ranjan Ghosh’s Rong Beronger Korhi and I quite liked his performance in that film. But Tui Shudhu Amar is not that film. It is a tasteless, flat, over-glammed, shiny piece of trashy commercial cinema whose sole purpose is to appeal to its viewer’s eyes, and neither the brain nor the heart.