Bad News from Blessy- Dileep- Meera!

“Calcutta News” produced by Thambi Antony for Kayal films and scripted and directed by Blessy stars Dileep and Meera Jasmine in the lead. The film had hogged a lot of limelight while in the making for reasons like the uniqueness of the subject being handled, for entirely being shot in Calcutta, the huge amount of money that was spent on the movie and also for Meera’s supposedly award winning performance. However, anyone who watches the movie after hearing all this is in for a rude shock for there is nothing unique or special about Calcutta News. Here is why I feel so: Calcutta News focuses on Krishnapriya (Meera Jasmine), an orphaned girl who gets married to Hari (Indrajith) at a community wedding and is brought to Calcutta. Hari supplies girls for flesh trade in Calcutta and when Krishna refuses to oblige, he beats her up and walks out of the house. Hari is later found murdered and Ajith Thomas (Dileep), a news reporter with Calcutta News identifies him since Hari and Krishna had accidentally been captured by his camera earlier while canning Durga Pooja celebrations in Calcutta. Ajith finds out Krishna being locked up in her house and decides to support and protect her. How he saves Krishna from the flesh trade mafia is what the rest of the story is about. While I completely agree that the film has been built on an interesting premise, it is the treatment of the film that makes it a loser. Blessy, the scriptwriter, looks confused as to how to take his narrative forward. He wants to show everything that happens in Calcutta in one movie and concentrates more on canning all prime locations in Calcutta than on taking his story forward. Blessy also spends a lot of time in explaining the background of his characters and puts in too many situations to tell his viewers that Ajith and Krishna are going to fall in love. What could have subtly been conveyed in a couple of shots is instead dragged forward for half an hour and a couple of songs have also been unnecessarily pushed into the narrative. By the time Blessy realizes his folly, the film completes 70% of its running time and thus, we have a highly irritating climax thus comes up all of a sudden jolting the viewers. The sequences showing black magic and Krishna’s mental disturbances could have been avoided since they do not add anything significant to the narrative. The characters of Innocent, Bindu Panicker, Vimala Raman, Bindiya and Manasa do not add value to the story or the script. If there is something that stands out in the movie, it is S Kumar’s camera. He shoots Calcutta and its locales like no one else has had in the past. His lighting style is innovative and he fills the movie up with a lot of good looking shots. Art Direction is good. The film could have easily been trimmed down by 30 minutes. The songs set to tune by Debjyothi Mishra are very ordinary. Meera Jasmine tries unsuccessfully to infuse life into Krishnapriya. This is easily the actor’s worst performance yet. Dileep struggles to look convincing as Ajith Thomas. The actor plays his part earnestly but his character fails him miserably. To sum up, Blessy needs to concentrate on his scripts before he starts out making a movie. He had set a high standard for himself with his debut vehicle “Kaazcha”. He has not been able to reach even 50% of what he achieved with Kaazcha in any of his three subsequent films.