Review: CHAURAHEN (CROSSROADS)

Any independent film producer will tell you that the completion date of a film is significantly less important than the release date. Rajshree Ojha's Chaurahen (Crossroads) was completed in 2007 and has been traveling the festival circuit for several years before finally hitting Indian cinema screens this last Friday. The distributor, PVR Director's Rare, also recently released Sudhish Kamath's intimate rom-com, Good Night | Good Morning, which opened to rave reviews and unfortunately little business. Chaurahen seems like it might be destined for a similar fate, though perhaps less critical fanfare for a film with a lot to say and relatively little to grab you.

The film charts the paths of three groups of people in three different parts of India over the course of a few days.  Each story is one of loss and the hope of redemption, though they aren't all entirely happy endings. A young man tries to cope with the loss of his parents and the preservation of his childhood home with the help of his girlfriend. An expat returns to his parents' house following the untimely death of his brother in battle, he attempts to reconcile his own insecurities with a secret he has decided to keep for the sake of his family. An aging doctor pines for his own youth and abandons his wife romantically to dive into the arms of a pretty young French girl. Each of these characters has their own significant loss to bear, but it isn't always clear why they act the way they do.

The symbolic losses of these characters either endear or repulse, and there are times when I wish Ojha had focused more on the sympathetic characters. For example, the aging surgeon's vanity and insecurity leads him to abandon his dutiful wife. We spend a lot of time with him and his plaything, but significantly less with his wife, who is the real interesting character of the trio. She casually attempts to piece her marriage back together, even as she continually comes across clumsily discarded evidence of her husband's philandering. Dr. Bose, played by Victor Banerjee, is a loathsome character, and one who the audience is programmed to despise, so why spend that much time with him? In the end, his redemption is by default, and really provides little hope for the future and seemingly comes at the cost of his wife's surrender.

Of the other two stories, it is the one featuring the young man, Naveen (Karthik Kumar), dealing with his grieving family that really engages and hits its mark most cleanly. The death of his brother, Keshy, at war has destroyed his parents and now Naveen will continue to live in his shadow which has only grown longer with his passing. Everyone in this story experiences and processes the loss in a different way, unfortunately for Naveen, his father uses it as an excuse to lash out. Grieving behavior is not always pretty, and in this case, Naveen must not only grieve for his own loss, but hide a secret that is pulling him away from his parents that he cannot explain.  Throw in an unnecessary, but beautiful, flashback with Keshy (Shayan Munshi) and a woman at a bar (Zeenat Aman), and you've got emotional manipulation that actually works pretty well.

I really liked Chaurahen for what it was, but there was something missing. The feelings of loss and the search for redemption in each story are sketched out, but not always fully formed. I think Rajshree Ojha has a great film in her, but for now we've got this very good one to settle on. Her last film, Aisha, was not very successful, and she's spent the last few months running around telling the press that the final cut was taken out of his hands and she doesn't take ownership of the product. That is unfortunate, but I hope someone gives her a chance, and I hope she takes it and digs just a little deeper next time around.