Review: The Window

Each year, you run a risk at the Toronto International Film Festival.  The risk is that the programmers are low on sleep, drunk, incompetent, or just like to play mean tricks on people.  I don't know which of those applied Sunday evening, but something was certainly afoot.

At worst, the film description on tiff.net for Buddhadev Dasgupta's The Window suggested a film that might be slightly bad, maybe boring, but it was a chance perhaps to see a story presented from the point of view of another culture.  What it did not say is what it should have said: This is a bad, bad movie.  Do not see this movie.  Whatever movies you have seen over the last 10+ years, this one will go right to the bottom of the heap of the worst.  Please, please stay away from this movie, unless it's being presented on a future episode of something along the lines of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I first had an inkling that the movie would be bad when a character spoke.  The sound was horrible.  They had obviously rerecorded the dialog after original filming and not only did the dialog sound bad, but it just didn't quite match the lip movements.  Then there were the subtitles.  Most of the movie was in the Bengali language, but there were parts in English.  It wasn't too strange that the subtitles continued when the characters spoke English now and then due to the accents.  It was strange, however, that the subtitles did not even closely match what they were saying.  And yeah, the music was bad, too.

Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, we can move on to the moronic plot.  Bimal is a lean, muscular Indian man who is love with Meera, a very beautiful young Indian woman.  At the beginning of the film, they discover that she is pregnant with his child, and they begin to try to figure out how they can get married and support themselves, because they're fairly broke and don't have good jobs.  Bimal works at an old folks home for grumpy old men who frankly don't look that old.  Maybe Indian men age well.  Meera, meanwhile, is a customer service rep for American Airlines and frequently talks with inane and/or rude American customers.

Anyway, Bimal per chance ends up touring his old high school, which is now in disrepair.  He decides to do his part to help the school by replacing a window from one of his classrooms that has since been stolen or broken.  And hey, why not, he drains he and Meera's life savings to make sure that the window, as closely as possible, resembles the original window.  Yeah, he's going to be a dad and all, but these kids need a window.  Sure, he's only replace one of about 50 missing windows, but he wants to do his part.

Along the way, there's an asinine subplot about some petty thief, which is supposed to provide humorous relief from the crappy drama, but it falls flatter than cheap naan.  Flatter, even, than that lame reference to Indian food.  The thief steals the window (Bimal, though in fine shape and about 20 years younger, cannot manage to catch him in a horribly choreographed chase scene) and when Meera discovers that the bank account has been drained, she quite reasonably dumps Bimal and he is miserable and sad.  End of story.

Don't waste your time.  My imdb rating: a rare 1/10.