The best thing about Chhoy-e Chhuti is its mind-blowing music. After Shantanu Moitra’s musical score in Antaheen and Neel Dutt’s score in Madly Bangalee, this is the third film in 2009 that will win the hearts of its audience with its wonderful seven tracks plus the background score. Gautam Ghoshal with his lyrics that are in rhythm with the pace and spirit of the film, with music to match and some of the best singers lending their voices to the six song tracks, is a talent to watch out for. The title song Amaader Chhuti Chhuti which takes off from a song from an old film and then goes its own way has a lovely sense of rhythm as seen through the varying beats. Ghoshal is brilliant even in his remixes of the three Rabindranath Tagore songs used in the film. Shilajit’s own composition that goes Chalo Mama Paliye is a memorable number full of joy and fun. Every song blends into each changing mood and situation of the film such as the fast numbers going with the journey as the crew is winding its way to its holiday destination while the more mellow Tagore songs reserved for the lonely and serious scenes. The song on a moonlit night lip-synced by Anjana is spell-binding. The last song in the car – Agun Jaalo, a famous Tagore song with its Western remixes in beat and melody, writes a fitting finale to the film. The orchestration of the song sequences and the choreography is imaginative and reveals the aesthetic sense of debut-making director Aniket Chattopadhyay.

Before this begins to read like a music review, it would be in the fitness of things to focus on the story and its spirit of holiday fun that sometimes goes wrong. If one looks at Chhoy-e Chhuti from a particular angle, then it a courageous film that offers a brazenly frank and ruthlessly open look at the innards of the film industry in Tollygunge in general and into the complex mindsets of the people who live, love and work within it in particular. From another point of view, it could possibly raise the hackles of many involved in the trade as actors to have their soiled underwear put out in public to dry. This refers specially to actors who did not take part in the film. If one ignores the tag-line Chhoy-e Chhuti – Ekta Shotti Golpo, meaning ‘a true story’, then the film can be taken as an entertaining road-movie in a metaphorical sense, that takes the viewer on a rollicking, rickety ride into a holiday resort along the beach fictitiously named Mahulpur-on-Sea.

But the ‘true-story’ tagline puts a completely different ‘colour’ to the characters and their inter-relationships, to the events as they unfold over the film and the values of the characters who are incidentally or intentionally, also the actors who are playing the characters. The revelations are shocking for ordinary people like you and me unitiated in the private lives of public stars. The ‘true’ part of this story is not entirely true. For instance, all the main actors are the characters they are playing. But if you look at their better-halves, they are pure fiction. The actress who plays Kharaj Mukherjee’s harridan-of-a-wife is not his wife in real life. Actor-singer Shilajit was never ever married to Locket Chatterjee as this film shows. Nor does he have a relationship going with Sonali Chowdhury. Anjana Basu is not married to Debshankar Haldar who plays her alcoholic husband; nor is Rudranil having an affair to exploit the newcomer Dona Das. One never heard of Anjana and (late) Kunal Mitra having a roaring affair. So where is the ‘truth’ in this story?

This self-reflexive film essays characters who shock the mundane man in the audience with their self-defined world of values and morality. The contradictions in their sleeping around, in their unending obsession for getting ‘maal’- imported or country, at any cost, in their brazenly open adultery, in their language heavily loaded with saalas and other such colourful vocabulary, are jarring when one finds Sonali and Shilajit chanting the Surjo Pronaam on the beach early in the morning or overjoyed when she hears that there is a tulsi plant in Shilajit’s home. In one scene, Locket tells Dona that Rudranil is using her in the name of getting her roles in films. The next minute, she begins to make sexual overtures to the same girl, promising to get her roles in films through her network! Anjana finds a new lease of romance with husband Debshankar who, in a moment of emotion, informs her that he has got a fellowship in Germany. She promises to give up her career and come along. But soon after, she gets back into her coochy-cooing with lover Kunal quite openly! Most of them sing very well and are fluent in Rabindra Sangeet. But then, why this unending thirst for alcohol? Kunal can recite very well, but does not think twice before slapping the sickly-looking caretaker-cum-manager-cum-bearer-cum-cook so hard that he falls in a dead faint with blood oozing out of his mouth and nose!

The character played by Debshankar suddenly becomes the conscientious voice of the story. The characters however, do not care being labeled ‘animals in a jungle’ by him. The most merciless element in the film is going on a holiday to a sea resort immediately following the accidental death a fellow-crew on the sets of the shooting! How can one be so mindlessly cold-blooded and inhuman? If there was no murder committed, the act of trying to conceal it is a crime because they did believe that murder had been committed! How can the script condone this act? The incredible anti-climax will be liked by some sections of the audience, while the rest might balk at the unfeeling, inhuman spirit that underlies it, turning a fun film fitting the Christmas mood into a rather cruel one.

Badal Sarkar’s cinematography is commendable specially in the way in which he captures the beaches and the sea and the bungalow lit from inside at night, or the sinister lighting when the bunch of actors are trying to hide the body of the man they think is dead. The lush green fields with the actors disguised as scarecrows are captured very well too. The actors just have to play themselves and they do this quite well with the exceptions of Dona Das who is amateurish, the actress who overacts as Kharaj’s terrible wife and Sonali whose nakhras belie the depth that the script shows she has.

Chhoy-e Chhuti has lovely music and good acting spoilt by too many ugly hiccups along the way.