Tridha is wonderful as a growing girl constantly in conflict with her parents while Pallavi Chatterjee as her over-eager, ambitious mother is a natural. The characterisation and acting is brilliant with top marks to Kamaleshwar Mukherjee as the secret agent followed by Kaushik Ganguly as the anguished son trapped by his mother’s terminal disease, Saheb and Mimi as the honeymooning couple and Tanushree as the girl with the sad story, etc. However, the dramatic twist in the climax undercuts these minor lapses. In contrast, the laughter, the bonhomie, the drinking party somewhat dilutes the intensity that unfolds in the drama. The other lapse lies in the conspicuous absence of life-devastating conflicts among the survivors, born of the basic self-preservation instinct found in man. The ‘truth or dare’ game survivors play define short stories within the larger story, a few of which are too cliché for this film like the Hindi teacher’s guilt of having molested a student and the cancer-ridden widow’s (Lily Chakraborty) back- story is another. Soumik Halder’s cinematography is devastatingly brilliant as it catches the light within the span of a single day the sunlight fading away slowly as the day begins to roll, sometimes turning attention towards the disturbed, confused, questioning faces of the victims trapped in a no-exit vortex of circumstances beyond their control. On hindsight, they were perhaps not needed at all as the film deals with crisis as the subject matter, the characters and how their lives are completely shaken by the crisis. The songs are on the soundtrack, but are so loud that they tend to disturb the flow. Set in contemporary West Bengal, the crisis initially seems simple and incident-driven, but as one goes along, the director’s and the cinematographer’s vision shifts and expands to focus on the characters, their interaction within the families, and their new bonds with fellow victims who are strangers. Though literally, the word khaad translates as ‘abyss’, Kaushik calls it ‘the fall.’ Kaushik Ganguly’s Khaad (The Fall) is a celluloid representation of crisis. Gargi Roy Choudhury, Bharat Kaul, Saheb Bhattacharya, Tanushree Chakraborty, Mimi Chakraborty, Tridha and othersĬrisis is a simple, six-letter word loaded with meanings that reach beyond the literal realm. Cast: Lily Chakraborty, Pallavi Chatterjee, Ardhendu Banerjee, Rudranil Ghosh,
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December 2022
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