Brake Fail has a dramatic opening. The groom’s party is waiting for the bride to come out. But repeated knocks on her door by her wicked stepmother reveals that she has run away. On a parallel track, a young man followed by his friend, rushes to catch the bus that will take him to Kolkata to Papaji’s garage.

When the setting shifts to Papaji’s garage, the audience is introduced to an entire gang of atypical characters, etched out in minute detail by Kaushik’s solid script. Santi is a permanently sozzled young man, whose chronic cynicism gives way to dreams of marriage when he gets into the act with Siddhartha and his cronies. Siddhartha is a prim and proper young man who believes in honesty and integrity but is forced to be dishonest because of the situation he is placed in. Henna/Roopa/Koel is strong, bold and powerful without having to give up on her femininity. Papaji is ingenuous to an extreme, which only indicates the largeness of his heart. The two mechanics, Gawja and Tony, are a delight to watch while the old couple triggers laughter without even trying to with deadpan faces and no-pitch dialogue delivery, thanks to the wonderful histrionics of Paran Bandopadhyay and Tanima Sen. Annu Kapoor as Papaji, a Punjabi emigrate to Kolkata, peppers his lines with references to dynamo, brake, etc. that link to his profession and speaks Bangla with a heavy Punjabi accent. Saswata Chatterjee as Santi takes the cake away. His performance has the solid backing of the rest of the acting cast. Parambrato as Siddhartha infuses his performance with the right mixture of anxiety, desperation, uncertainty, nervousness and discomfort, greatly relieved when he is with Roopa or is singing away with his garage cronies. Even Santu Mukherjee as Nikhilesh, Dhruv Mkherjee as Roopa’s fiancé and Arindam Sil as the police officer who keeps reminding everyone that his name Ball, is spelt with a double 'L' add their bit to the rest. Swastika as the only significant female character has a lot of responsibility placed on her shoulders and she fulfils it admirably, looking beautiful too.

The narrative is filled with fun, adventure, chases, fights, action, but only till Siddhartha reaches Nikhilesh’s sprawling mansion to take up his managerial post which includes setting the table and fixing the daily menu! It is the reincarnation idea that makes the film slide down into incredulous incidents and events that take away the essence of humour and romance the film is soaked with till this point. Ganguly loses his directorial and script-wise grip as he loses himself in a self-created maze of reincarnation, fairy tale, disguises, a fake Godman (Papaji), and so on, allowing wonderful entertainment to slide to exaggerated sentiment and melodrama.

But that does not write off the entertainment quotient of Brake Fail. Rakesh Kumar Singh’s cinematography captures the mobile scenes in the bus and truck beautifully, including the garage scenes and that impromptu picnic alongside a clump of trees in a moonlit night. The scene where the reincarnated Roopa rises from the river waters and climbs up the steps is beautifully photographed, to end in humour when, instead of embracing her ‘father’ Nikhilesh, she embraces Siddhartha who is standing right behind!

The film is filled with hilarious lines and scenes, embellished with brilliant lyrics by Kaushik himself set to music by the talented Neel Dutt. A constable, while rushing into a police jeep to chase two ‘arms smugglers’ tells his colleague, “This time, the window seat is mine.” The wife of the aged husband-wife pair, forced to wander the streets on their packers-and-movers truck, says, “We are like Goddess Durga on Bisarjan day, wandering around endlessly in this truck.” The industrialist involved in smuggling illegal arms introduces himself as “Ami Subhash Bolchhi” after a famous biography of Netaji. 

But it is the music that is the pivot around which the film and its story move. When the mechanics are on the go, one hears the opening music of one of Rang De Basanti’s songs. In one brief moment, when Shanti talks about getting married, we hear strains of Ek Ladki ko Dekha. The six song tracks flow through the film like a river. Three songs Jhingha Lala Jhinga Lala, followed by Jodi Proshno Koro and then Shorey Shorey, a Hindi-Bengali remix, deserve special mention. The six songs embrace the extreme polarities of Rabindra Sangeet on the one end and bhangra on the other. The music is contemporary and nostalgic at the same time.

Among the anomalies, there are glaring ones. The uniforms the mechanics wear are spotless like television detergent ads. So are the mechanics’ faces. Papaji’s Godman disguise is terrible. His tricks on Roopa’s ‘fiance’ are overdone and the film is allowed to drag interminably towards the end making us wonder whether it will end at all. But all said and done, Brake Fail is an imaginative fusion of cultural diversities through language, lyrics, dialogue and song that is one way of transcending regional borders to reach out to a more national audience.