Roga Howar Shohoj Upay when translated into English means “An Easy Way to Become Slim.” The story revolves around what happens when a newly married wife suddenly overhears and encounters snide remarks about her weight and bad comparisons with her slim and handsome husband. The synopsis describes Ranjana (Raima Sen) as “sweet and chubby” but she can hardly be labelled ‘chubby’ even if one takes in her ever-so-slightly protruding tummy. Problem is – Ranjana is a foodie and her husband Joy (Parambrato) is a chef at the starred hotel and is ever willing to give in to his beautiful bride’s sudden, erratic and out-of-the-box spurges of hunger for food. Joy has no issues with his wife’s so-called obesity. But she is convinced that her overweight will take their marriage to the rocks. So the two visits a kind of magic slimming clinic that promises to give her an incredible figure in seven days!
The entire film is based on the false premise of a woman who is already slim thinks she is not! Can Raima Sen be labelled overweight or obese? Give us a break please. The director should have hit on a real chubby heroine to play Ranjana and then the story would have been somewhat credible. It must have been some kind of cast-packaging strategy to rope in the two sisters Raima and Ria to portray two women in the same film and thus make the story collapse even before it really began.
Joy has to go on a business trip out of town but when he knocks on his door, a beautiful and slim young girl in a very short red dress says she is Ranjana, rid of those extra pounds of flesh! The film is supposed to become extremely funny after this point but sadly, it does not. There are heavy doses of surrealistic touches such as the madly-in-love pair taking a trip to a brinjal field so that Joy can dish up some brinjal pudding; or, the seductive but overweight slimming parlour owner (Kamalika Bhattacharya) having an animated cartoon character for a fat boyfriend’ and so on which hardly belongs anywhere in the script. The songs, thankfully are only on the soundtrack. There is some liberal use of very bad sexual innuendo where we see Sandy (Biswanath Basu) taking a massage somewhere in Hongkong or Singapore and referring to ‘wholesome bananas.’ A ghost-like character with a scary face-mask terrorizes Ranjana by stalking her physically and through telephone calls. He calls himself ‘cholesterol’ but Joy is just not bothered this way or that.
How do these incidents relate to a slim girl wanting to be slim is a mystery only the director who also wrote the story and script can solve. But one wonders if he knows the answer to this huge jigsaw puzzle that jars on your nerves and drives your patience to the edge till you want to walk out of the theatre with your sanity intact. One feels sympathy for the entire acting cast who are talented performers but are hardly asked to show their gift in a film that has an apology for a story! One also wonders what happened to Joy and Ranjana’s sex life when the slimmer and prettier version of his wife comes back instead of the original one and he cannot accept her. This is supposed to be a comedy with a surrealistic touch so no questions asked. Rudraneel has been roped in, like his friend Kanchan Mullick and good actors like Biswajeet Chakraborty and Anindyo Bose just like that because their characters are also-rans in this terrible script.
Other technological support such as cinematography, editing and sound design need no mention and the technical crew just had to deliver without challenge or opportunity to showcase their command over their respective technique. The rating of three over ten is somewhat exaggerated because this critic wanted to be kind to the debutant director.
Bengali, Drama, Comedy, Color