The central theme of Khela, hidden within the narrative of the strange bonding between a fledgling new director and the kid hero of his first film, is the duality of the world we live in – at once the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, the mundane and the adventurous, giving the film an explicitly psycho-social dimension with multiple perspectives layered within the main story. Rituparno Ghose comes into his own after several films with Khela, written and scripted by him with the dialogues and lyrics penned by him as well. He gets into his self-reflexive mindset, offering one of the most insightful glimpses into the crazy world of filmmakers and filmmaking where nothing is organized, communication between and among the team is zilch, where shooting has to stop because it is raining and also because it is NOT raining. The team spirit and the camaraderie come across beautifully. But that is just one small layer of this many-layered, zigzag journey through the wild game of life. Khela unravels this game called Life, or, in a turn of phrase, throws up the fragility of life that, just like any game, may be won or lost or drawn, but must be lived through till the final denouement. We tend to identify more with the story than with the characters. As the film unfolds layer by slow layer, the sheer momentum of the narrative and its emotional mechanisms carry us away.

At times, Khela reminds one of German expressionist cinema, based on the external expression of internal feelings through setting, lighting, décor, and other visual elements provided specially in the internal flashbacks of Raja’s memories of Sheela. An example of this expressionist influence is seen in the darkly lit interior of the taxi in which Raja drops his wife off at her cousin’s place in the opening frames of the film. The two worlds of the film, Raja’s world of shooting his first film with the naughtiest kid in town, and the inner world of nostalgic moments with his wife, is constantly played off against each other. The two worlds overlap all the time, inside the cluttered room of the bungalow on location, or, when he looks through the camera lens trying to take the perfect shot, a rain-splashed evening in Kolkata with flooded streets when he invites a friend to come over for khichuri and deem bhaja. Alas! The larder is empty, informs his quiet but bitter wife.

Prosenjit looks marvellous with that beard and gives one of the best performances of his career. One begins to feel the tragedy of remaining trapped within the cliché, stereotype, masala hero image in bad to worse films. He is wonderful as the selfish, self-absorbed filmmaker out to make the first and biggest film of his life, nonchalant about his wife’s need for him and for a child, indulgent to the extreme of diverting the police to a different location. The same man is moved when Abhirup brings him some caterpillars in a bottle because he has earlier allowed the butterflies for the shoot to fly away. The caterpillars growing to become butterflies is a cinematic cliché not expected in a Rituparno Ghosh film. Manisha, completely stripped of her Bollywood chutzpah, gives the most low-key performance she ever has. Raima’s performance is a copybook model on the evolution of a star into an actress. Shankar Chakravarty is very good as Bikram, Raja’s producer friend. The family backdrop of Abhirup is perhaps the only drawback of the film with that weepy and simpering mother and the no-nonsense father who is too matter-of-fact for a father whose son has been kidnapped.

Akashneel as Abhirup carries the film squarely on his small shoulders. Sharp and witty, his childish naiveté comes across when he coolly asks Anjali to go sleep in Raja’s tent when she tells him there is no extra bed in her tent. He is as naughty as can be, precocious this minute and a small child the very next. He hardly misses his parents but says he may begin to miss them after six weeks, when the shoot gets over. He is bribed with chocolates when he refuses to shoot because they have shaved off his hair. He gives the team a terrible scare when he goes missing but is actually hiding under costume designer Anjali (Raima Sen)’s bed for fear of being pulled up for letting the butterflies fly away. He tears off the page from the diary that has Raja’s telephone number noted in it, then picks money from his piggy bank to make him a call from a grocer’s shop asking Raja to stage a ‘kidnap.’ “RL Stevenson’s Kidnapped is a rapid reader in school,” he informs Raja.

Khela is action-packed, picturesque and filled with unpredictable twist and turns. Yet, the film has a lyrical pace created and backed by the beautiful title song written by Rituparno and rendered by Shrikanta Acharya. There are moving slices of a forgotten rain-song from the Tagore archive lip-synched by Sheela and sung by Parama Banerjee in a scene captured in half-silhouette by the sheer magic Abhik Mukherjee’s camera weaves throughout the film. The artificial rains created with the hosepipes of a fire engine give Abhirup a bad attack of fever. Climate therefore, unwittingly turns into a character. Khela is filled with a spirit of vigour that gives it one more dimension. Arghyakamal Mitra’s editing is seamless and smooth, blending the past with the present, the change of scene from Sheela’s Kurseong home back to the shooting location cut to the disturbed parents of Abhirup, handled skillfully without breaking the narrative or disturbing the aesthetics of the film.

Like authors who hate to put the full stop to their writings, filmmakers find it difficult to end a film where it should. Rituparno is an exception. “Come out Raja, my parents have arrived,” shouts Abhirup from the garden where he is playing cricket. And the credits begin to come up. As the cheering audience begins to drag its feet out of Nandan, it carries with it a heavy hangover of this wonder-child called Akashneel, who, one is sure, must have put Rituparno Ghosh through the same terrifying paces in real life the way Abhirup put his on-screen director Raja in Khela.