What is Box No.1313? Is it a reality show on television helping to make Joy decide who he will finally tie the knot with in real life? Or, is it the number of the ad his parents placed in the newspaper matrimonial ads column? Is Box No. 1313 a film? Or, is it the filming of a television reality show anchored by Joy’s friend? Is it a satire on the institution of arranged marriage? Or, according to the final ‘ten questions’ game played by Raima, is it a pointer to the total loss of ‘love’ from the vocabulary of young people today who immediately come up with ‘terrorism’ when asked about ‘love’?

Unlike filmmakers who go on ad infinitum professing that theirs is a ‘different’ film, are Box No.1313 is really different. It has a loosely structured narrative that sometimes tends to get out of control. But on the whole, though it is no great shakes as an archival film, it does entertain with its frothy humour. The film opens with Joy’s parents rushing to bid a sad farewell to Saranya about to fly away to London with her brand new husband. As they drive back home, Joy’s parents get in and out of the flashback mode trying to work out what went wrong with their son’s close bonding with Saranya for the girl to marry someone else. Biswajit, firmly rooted to his studio room wallpapered with magnified versions of matrimonial ads for widows, elderly men, etc, holds forth on the story of Joy’s life. Joy himself peeps in and out of the script without making much sense of it all or of the film till Raima appears on the scene to give it some semblance of sanity.

Aniruddha Bhattacharya keeps one’s cerebral juices flowing with references to the poetry of Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sukumar Roy, Tagore songs, Joy’s ‘band’ songs, Satyajit Ray’s film and his favourite game of ‘ten questions’ to lend the film an ambience of the intellectual. But he is completely oblivious of the fact that the Y generation of Bengalis may not make head or tail of these intellectual references. More in tune is the copy of Munnabhai who, along with his team of ‘doctors’ smashes Joy’s father’s car to smithereens and then talks sweetly to him. The Shundi King episode is okay only till the point his three girls lighten his pocket of the money he had hidden from them. After this, the whole thing goes rolling downhill because it does not belong to the script anymore. The Shundi King and his three assistants tie up Joy’s mother and rob her of her entire jewellery but go around scot-free, reducing the Kolkata police to the laughing stock it already is but does not know about it. Why Joy’s band pops out of the screen every now and then remains a mystery. In fact, it takes quite some footage to arrive at the fact that Joy is a television anchor. Sujoy Dutta-Roy’s jay-walking editing is just right for the jay-walking screenplay and for the film as a whole. Premendu Bikash Chaki’s cinematography is fine, taking in the village greens, the indoor scenes, the roads of Kolkata like bits and pieces of a collaged picture trying to get into some meaning.

The title song that runs through the film and refers to today’s lover’s agent the SMS, is okay and jells with the film but after a point of time, you tend to forget it even exists. Parambrato who is almost his real self, portrays the confused and puzzled Joy to perfection but lacks conviction as the hotly popular anchor of a famous television reality show. Paoli has a small role and does it well but it is Monami who shines as Raima in a solid, author-backed role. Paran Bandopadhyay as King Shundi is as good as he always is. But his three young bandit queens stick out like sore thumbs in a hand filled with thumbs sans fingers. The worst drama is in the television studio where the three judges who play their real selves – writer Suchitra Bhattacharya, lyricist-singer-music director Anindyo and Rimjhim Mitra are atrocious in their exaggerated dramatics. Whether this was designed by the director and his script one has no way of knowing but it makes for a rather cheap climax for an otherwise imaginatively comic film.

Like most debut directors, Bhattacharya fills as many things as he possibly can into his first film - poetry, band music, newspapers, laptops, CDs, cell-phones, other films, quotes, television reality shows. He pulls off some of these quite well but fails to tell a coherent story. He deserves credit, however, for the courage to bring across what he professes is an ‘interactive’ film that actually invites the audience to participate in Joy’s dilemma and try to help him come out of it.