Via Darjeeling threatens to tease your psyche!

The ensemble star-cast consisting of Kay Kay, Rajat Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Sonali Kulkarni, Sandhya Mridul, Simone Singh, Prashant Narayanan etc., drew me to a nearby multiplex to watch Via Darjeeling. I went in with a lot of expectations to watch a different movie with great performances. Right from the word go, the film went tragically awry as first-time director Arindam Nandy ends up pigeonholing a potentially strong ensemble cast into looking like rank amateurs!

The film follows the format of one story, with multiple versions / endings, a strong inspiration of story-telling technique of the very recently released Vantage Point which again is inspired from Akira Kurosawa’s Oscar nominated Rashomon. Unlike Roshomon, the problem with Via Darjeeling is that the main story is incomplete, so all assumptions and interpretations don’t look convincing at all. In fact the multiple versions of the story tend to lack imagination and what you get are the most obvious stories you'd expect given the circumstances, and hence, the whole excitement of multiple narrations is lost in the film and also Via Darjeeling lacks a convincing climax, which was the highlight of Roshomon. The director’s option for an open and rather abrupt end leaves the film with several questions unanswered. Which version of the story is true is left to your individual imagination and assumption!

Via Darjeeling is set in modern day Calcutta & Darjeeling and is supposedly based on a Bengali tradition called 'adda' (haven’t heard of it though) where friends get together in the rains, & exchange stories & gossip, over drinks & dinner! I also wonder, why the title Via Darjeeling? The film barely captures any scenic beauty of the place; instead the film is full of closed-room-conversations!

Literature and cinema have played with the idea of the variable narration for ages, fooling us and then making us applaud how well we've been fooled. And here, in Via Darjeeling, the idea is used at its quirkiest that threatens to tease your psyche!