With a title like that, Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s third feature is bound to invite many a comparison with Sergio Leone’s bombastic historical epics about the U.S. But Once Upon A Time in Calcutta isn’t a grandiose elegy celebrating national foundation myths. Rather, the Indian filmmaker has delivered a delicate and desolate ballad about his hometown’s foundation being hollowed out, to the point that it caves in on itself – literally, in fact, in one cataclysmic moment.
That climactic implosion aside, Sengupta’s film is closer in size, style and sensitivity to a more recent namesake – that is, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s beautifully bleak and understated stare into the dark heart of the Turkish national psyche. With that film’s DP Gökan Tiryaki on board, Once Upon A Time in Calcutta is a stark and brooding ensemble drama in which a diverse constellation of characters – a failed actor, a frustrated engineer, a fibbing entrepreneur and the frantic owner of a dilapidated theater – struggle to stay afloat in that ceaseless cycle of greed and lies that seems to be driving Kolkata (the current name for Calcutta) slowly into the ground.
Arriving around the 50th anniversary of two similarly-themed Indian classics about Kolkata’s doom and demise – Satyajit Ray’s Seemabaddha, a sharp critique of the moral corruption engulfing the city’s emerging corporate class, and Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71, an adaptation of multiple short stories about the struggle of an assortment of Kolkatans from various classes – Once Upon A Time in Calcutta should have a sustained run on the festival circuit after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where Sengupta’s first film Labour of Love bowed in 2014. (The present film is not to be confused with Junoon: Once Upon A Time in Calcutta, a sensationalist Indian political thriller from 2017.)
Sengupta’s film begins with Ela (Sreelekha Mitra) and Shishir (Satrajit Sarkar) mourning the passing of their young daughter. The death we see is not just that of a child, but the innocence she seems to symbolize. Having spent years struggling to restart her acting career, Ela decides to junk her stale marriage and venture into the unknown. But it’s a formidable task, as banks reject her applications for a loan for a new apartment.
Ela’s new life, from here onwards, will be shaped by three men. Her estranged step-brother, Bubu (played by Bratya Basu, who’s also a well-known playwright and politician), ignores her pleas to sell their father’s abandoned theater and share the proceeds. It’s an act born of Bubu’s distaste for his step-sister’s roots – she’s the daughter of a lowly cabaret singer his father had a tryst with – and also his attachment to his family’s long-faded grandeur, something that resembles Kolkata’s.
Pradipto (Anirban Chakrabarti), on the other hand, looks like Ela’s savior. A wheeler-dealer who sponsors the trashy astrology TV show that she hosts for a living, he showers her with gifts and affection, and his rickety real estate schemes provide her with an opportunity seemingly too good to refuse. A gung-ho go-getter surging ahead with ever-fantastical plans to make a quick buck, Pradipto is the face of the future – not his own, but also that of the city he seeks to transform.
While Ela acknowledges this parvenu’s financial appeal, her heart is drawn towards Bhaskar (Arindam Ghosh), a married engineer with whom she was once in love when she was young. While the pair are genuinely happy in rekindling their heartfelt relationship, Bhaskar also has real life to contend with. A principled professional working in a corrupt industry, he struggles to fight off sleazy contractors forcing him to take their below-par material for a construction project he’s overseeing.
Just as much as these individuals, brought vividly to life through the cast’s unfailingly nuanced performances, represent the myriad dilemmas for Kolkata’s future, the city’s urban landscape plays a key role in the film as well. Take the mega-flyover Bhaskar is building. Looming large over the lives of everyone in the film – it is designed to tear through the neighborhood where Bubu’s theater stands and plays a part in one of Pradipto’s get-rich-quick schemes – it provides the film with a very potent symbol of the perils of so-called progress. Here, Sengupta taps into Kolkata’s fascination with bridges as a sign of its modernity, and also the notorious legacy of these very structures caving in on themselves.
The director’s thinly-veiled skepticism towards this hare-brained embrace of progress is also evident in his despairing depiction of how people have trivialized and cannibalized the image and work of perhaps Kolkata’s and India’s most revered writer, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Throughout the film, his words can be heard blaring out of speakers on street corners, set to atrociously banal electronic muzak, while busts of the poet are placed across the city as part of an official campaign to promote “civility”. But nobody seems to care, in what is perhaps yet another of Sengupta’s damning critiques of the depths to which Kolkata has fallen.
Running well beyond the two-hour mark, Once Upon A Time in Calcutta remains an immersive experience throughout, as Sengupta draws the viewer slowly but surely into his visual and sonic vortex of quotidian despair and moral deprivation. Through his carefully crafted constellation of failing relationships and his spot-on depiction of the fatalistic ambience around them – all thanks to Tiryaki’s camerawork and Jonaki Bhattacharya’s production design – Sengupta has delivered a powerful j’accuse, as Mrinal Sen did half a century ago.
Sen lamented, in his 1973 film Padatik, how Kolkata is “an intimidating and infernal city, unredeemed and probably doomed”. “It must be sure impossible that it can continue much longer than this,” he wrote. “Yet it always does.” Once Upon A Time in Calcutta is proof that it does, indeed, and it probably will.
Director, screenplay and editing: Aditya Vikram Sengupta
Cast: Sreelekha Mitra, Anirban Chakrabarti, Arindam Ghosh, Bratya Basu, Satrajit Sarkar
Producers: Aditya Vikram Sengupta, Vikram Mohinta, Jonaki Bhattacharya, Anshulika Dubey, Priyanka Agarawal, Shashway Singh, Ingrid Lill Høgtun, Marie Fuglestein Lægreid, Linda Bolstad Strønen, Catherine Dussart
Cinematography: Gökhan Tiryaki
Production and costume design: Jonaki Bhattacharya
Music: Minco Eggersman
Sound: Hindole Chakraborty, Bruno Tarriere
Production companies: For Films (India), Wishberyy Films (India), DUOfilm (Norway), Catherine Dussart Productions (France)
World sales: Pluto Film
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In Bengali
131 minutes
