C/O Sir

Starring: Saswata Chatterjee, Raima Sen, Sudipta Chakraborty, Indraneil Sengupta
Directed by Kaushik Ganguly
Rating: **

After his memorable Shobdo, which was an evocative exploration of a sound artist’s obsession with his medium, expectations were high from Kaushik Ganguly. But his latest, C/O Sir, does not live up to it, lacking the sensitivity and the sensuality of Shobdo. Which is a shame, because inherent in the central theme of the current film—blindness—is just as much potential.

The senses play a key role in this film too, in the way the protagonist—and vicariously we the audience—interprets the objective physical world first and then subsequently the subjective, psychological one.

A school-teacher (Saswata Chatterjee) is informed by his doctor that he is gradually going blind because of a retinal infection. The film in fact opens with the close-up of a human eye undergoing a vision test. We hear voices—of doctor and patient in conversation—without seeing either of them at first, as though we too are sharing in the experience.

This somewhat cliched theme of the deprivation of one sense leading to the sharpening of the others recurs through the film, but to Ganguly’s credit it is not thrust upon us jarringly with statements or monologues, but conveyed through a racy plot and some suspense. A mystery woman (Raima) lands up to help the teacher deal with a threat to his property in north Bengal, near his beloved school, where he is no longer welcome. We are kept guessing about what his friend-cum-adv­ocate (Indraneil) really wants from him; we suspect the headmaster to be corrupt, in collusion with the land mafia. But things are not as they seem. The movie packs in masala in the form of murder, betrayal, bedroom scenes and even a hint of a love triangle.

Ironically, the film’s attempt at being a thril­ler, romance and a movie with a social message mars its potential to be the sensual experience it should have been. So the moments of heightened sensual perception—like when Saswata ‘feels’ the presence of the headmaster as he tiptoes past him rather than hear his footsteps—get lost in all the fuss. If Ganguly had focused on the exploration of the central theme—the moment of the teacher’s loss of vision of the outer world becoming the point of his gaining inner sight—with a simpler plot (minus the murders) it would not have stuck in the mould of a one-dimensional plot trying to thrill for the sake of it. The cinematography and editing is chic and in keeping with the fast-paced plot. That brings us to the lead actor. While Sasw­ata (who recently portrayed Ritwik Ghatak in a biopic on the filmma­ker and is emerging as one of Bengal’s leading actors) plays the just-gone-blind teacher with conviction, it must be said that he had packed in much more power and weight to the bit-role of a diabolic insurance agent in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahani.