The title of the film “Shesh Boley Kichhu Nei” (loosely translated, it reads There’s nothing such as the end!) could have served more effective purpose as a warning note to the audience. Five minutes into the Anjan Dutta film, a vain exercise in self indulgence dwelling on narcissism; it was clearly going to be a trial by fire testing out the audience’s patience in enduring mundane mediocrity…the 2 hour 10 minutes of the film turned into a dreary crawl through 7800 seconds! And if the rest of this review seems to be rambling and incoherent at places, I must declare that I am merely attempting to adopt the style and form of the film itself!
Fresh out of the theatre, the most baffling aspect for me is the script, both the content and the writing as well. I am still unable to figure out whether the film was about a father-son bonding, nostalgia about one’s hometown, effects of contemporary life on human relationships, an individual’s crusade against drugs or the soul searching journey of a man down the city streets! Despite the apparent wide range of spectrum, the common factor holding them together is the fact that all the aforementioned elements go through sufficient dilution and fizzle out without leaving a trace. The film is an epitome of providing simplistic solutions to artificial crises; something symptomatic of contemporary Bengali Cinema!
Add to the above a weak screenplay that lacks a sense of rhythm and proportion and getting annoyingly repetitive and redundant with every frame. While we are hammered with the fact that Koko and Kakoli (Shubhasree Ganguly) and Ananda and Andy (Jisshu Sengupta) are the same person in every second dialogue and in every scene featuring these characters, there’s this character played by Bratya Basu whose name (perhaps mentioned once in passing) and purpose in the film remains an enigma. He kept appearing from time to time, trying to convince the protagonist Animesh Roy (Anjan Dutta) that the city has changed in the last thirty years and that he should go back to Bangkok! Might’ve been really pivotal, if not for half a dozen other characters were already doing the same thing ever since Roy had set foot in the city! Oh, and there was humor in the script too where everyone in Kolkata seemed to confuse Bangkok with various South Asian countries, cities and provinces…wonder why?
Raymond Chandler once wrote, “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption”. I would like to believe that Chandler was not just talking about the artist, but also the user or beholder or the audience getting redeemed. Shesh Boley Kichhu Nei involves almost a competition of getting redeemed with every major character taking part in the process one by one. However, without commenting on the outcome, I must confess that the process itself unfolds at the cost of a section of the right thinking audience sacrificing their rational faculty, judgment and consciousness!
Arup Ratan Samajdar
