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All talk and stilted performances

Genre: Drama

Director: Kallol Sen

Cast: Madhoo, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Sandhya Shetty, Seema Mishra,

Vishal Vatwani

Storyline: A group of urban youth keep falling in and out of love with

each other, almost.

Bottomline: You can’t imagine how bad!

Don’t be misled by the sleazy posters. At the end of ‘Kabhi Socha Bhi Na Tha,’ the audience that hoped for some hardcore exploitation-film action was grossly let down.

But yes, there is a lot of sex in the film. All talk. And, some eyesore in the name of realism – something you would rather miss. One’s not being moralistic here. It’s purely a matter of art and aesthetics.

Apparently, the Censor Board refused a certificate initially saying that the audiences were not yet mature for such content. Thankfully, Sharmila Tagore intervened to let people decide on the maturity levels of all involved. Given the amount of English, talk of sex and sexual behaviour in the film, it looks more like an amateur video aimed at those who watch cinema purely as an art form. In spite of some unbelievably stilted performances by the ensemble (except for an earnest Madhoo lost in a half-baked role), ’Kabhi Socha…’ passes off as a film only because of some clever editing.

Ashmith Kunder, the editor, tries his best to salvage all material shot, including the staged ‘Making of the film’ and fake ‘auditions,’ trying to thread it all together with supers (super-imposed text) that bridge disconnected sequences with a one-line description of the missing scenes. Sample: Ritu and Neel have a fight. Though you are tempted to discount all this and give it points for trying to make something out of all the nonsensical rushes filled with mediocrity (both acting and writing, let alone the dialogue delivery), what annoys is the director insisting in the end that it was all intentional, by design.

In the last scene of this largely textual home-video montage, a character of the film, Madhoo as Radhika, a lesbian relationship counsellor, moments after a re-union dinner with buddies, bumps into the director Kallol Sen in a cameo and introduces herself as an actress and tells him that it wasn’t an accident but all part of a larger divine plan.

What cock and bull!

SUDHISH KAMATH

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