Piya Re (2018)

Piya Re is a Bengali movie released on 10 Aug, 2018. The movie is directed by Abhimanyu Mukherjee and featured Soham Chakraborty, Srabanti Chatterjee and Kanchan Mullick as lead characters.

Love is the most beautiful thing to have, the hardest thing to earn and the most painful thing to lose. Tenida’s effortless wit, pithy one-liners and Piya Re easy sarcasm are nowhere to be found in the film. Kanchan’s loud, screeching deliveries are cringe and make the humour come across as garish and quite unwatchable. In comedy, the ‘wrong’ casting can sometimes do wonders for an adaptation, especially if it’s a modern re-telling; but a casting blunder like this one is a disservice to not just the source material but also to a performer as seasoned as Kanchan.In the film, based on the Jhau Bungalow Rahashya, Teni da’s Potoldanga cohorts, Kyabla, Habul and Pyala are no longer sophomores and are in their mid-20s. They head to Darjeeling for a vacation where they encounter scientist Dr Santra. He claims to have devised a formula that could end global warming. The friends are invited to Santra’s supposedly haunted bungalow after Kyabla, who’s a scientist himself shows interest in helping Santra to make the solution.But there’s trouble afoot in Jhau Bungalow; Santra is supposedly being targetted by a smuggler, the boys encounter the sari-clad apparition of Santra’s dead daughter and his wife warns them to stay off the property. The production design allows the makers to sell the ambience of horror or unease to audiences and even the frames capturing the hills are terrifically shot.The film plays up the ideas of lost north Kolkata neighbourhoods, gully cricket and ‘parar’ rock which are pretty key to Teni da’s stories.