The 'chhaya (shadow) chhobi' by Anik Dutta overshadows ghost films of both Tollywood and Bollywood taken together in recent times. The synthetic, eery and blood-curdling horror is not the mainstay here; instead, the ghosts - from several strata and time periods - try means of survival from their live counterparts who are overtaken by an inhuman changeover resulting in unwittingly chasing out ghosts from haunted mansions. How the real ghosts - an endangered species now - will drive away the real-estate sharks is not the attractant of the film. Though the film is not an unplumbed one as regards the delivery of message, yet messages run over almost all the delivered dialogues, mostly laced with puns, and make the piece a unique experience, heretofore unmatched by and large, presenting the changing face of the city of Kolkata gradually being taken over by promoters and reality agents; thus changing Kolkata's heritage into Hertfordshire.
Dutta borrows directly, bathing in the light of his own interpretation, from Ray - his Gupi Bagha trilogy, his style of dialogues, his range of humour and so on - and Dutta does this in a rather grandiloquent and rarefied manner heaping loads of honour and expressing allegiance to Ray along the way unflinchingly.
Story, screenplay, lyrics and direction amalgamate into a homogeneous mixture of great cinema. Aveek Mukhopadhyay's cinematography calls for praise though there are still vestiges of development. Arghyakamal Mitra has, as always, shown his craft here piecing together the various time- frames. Indranil Ghosh's work is flawless like in most other films, too. Kanan Devi's nasal voice from the by-gone era tones up the pathos of one of the messages the film seamlessly delivers - practice of clandestine concubinage by some spoilt upstarts and the well-off of the time. Coming down to the characters, their engaging idiosyncrasies and their pathos to boot make this seriocomedy a psychotherapeutic exercise giving the right directions and at the same time parodying the state of affairs in Kolkata and elsewhere. What we have to remember is that branches of development must not turn deadwood in the end.
