Subrata Sen is a talented director. He established his credentials with Ek Je Aachhe Kanya more than a decade ago. Though the story was plagiarized from Crush, a Hollywood film, Sen relocated it to Kolkata and gave it a contemporary Bengali identity and in the process, gifted Indian cinema with one its most talented actresses – Konkona Sen. Sen could never repeat the brilliance of his first film. Given his inconsistent and uneven directorial oeuvre, his films have had mixed critical response and no commercial success.
Sen personally publicized Koyekti Meyer Golpo on the social network, claiming it was a film about girls who work as ‘escorts’ in Kolkata. The subject is unique in Bengali cinema and very rare in Indian mainstream cinema. I am constrained to point out however, that despite his best intentions, Sen’s research on the escort service is insufficient and faulty. Koyekti Meyer Golpo misrepresents real escort women. Since cinema is often defined as willful suspension of disbelief, a director has the right to take liberties with authenticity. But with a delicate subject like escort services, one needs to be more precise in detailing the subject.
Misrepresentation not only takes the audience’s information and knowledge for granted but it also underestimates its intelligence. It can be grossly unfair to the group it represents. Koyekti Meyer Golpo is a classic example of misrepresentation of escort service girls. Escorts are generally drawn from the educated middle and higher middle class who step into the profession by choice and not, like the film shows, because a boyfriend has ditched the girl in question.
These girls attach themselves to an escort service agency that represents their interests and negotiates the pricing on their behalf. The agency also advertises its ‘services’ in the media and acts as a link between the client and its member. The girls are attractive, reasonably educated and can fluently converse in two or three languages including English. They are skilled in conversing intelligently and knowledgably on different subjects and are ship-shape in terms of their physique and their looks. They wear expensive clothes and make-up. They can hardly be distinguished from mainstream women in a crowd and this is one of their USPs. Their price is pegged at very high rates. This draws women from elite groups to step into the profession that guarantees a high degree of anonymity as well as very good returns within a brief span. Basically, they are no different from the ordinary sex worker except the sophistication and the classy air they bring into the profession.
Unlike what we see in KMG, they would never go miles near a sting operation on a stinking rich client and try to blackmail him with MMS clips saved on a pen drive. The film in this sense, also insults the intelligence of a rich businessman client (Supriyo Dutt) who readily plays blind man’s buff in the arched garden of a hotel with one of these girls! He pays the two escort girls Rs.1 crore to get the pen-drive with the you-know-what pictures so the girls do not need to keep telephoning to get to the hot seat of Kaun Banega Crorepati!
In real life, escorts do not solicit clients directly in discotheques and pubs like we see Pooja (Tanushree) do in this film. Sen also adds a love story. Molly (Parno Mitra) falls head over heels in love with a blind writer (Subrat Dutta) after guiding him across a street and reaching him home. She quits the profession for this writer who is very famous but has not dictated a single line for ten long years! Now he wants to write the story about this girl he has fallen in love with. She says, “It is not just my story, it is the story of many such girls in the city,” trying to justify the title of the film. But will an escort girl fall in love with the first blind writer she meets in the city?
To quote from the site of an escort agency blog, “An escort girl is a woman employed by an agency to provide entertainment to the client. That entertainment depends on the liking of client - whether he wants to enjoy the night life of city, just to go on a casual date, wants a simple dinner in a good restaurant or wants to fill his sexual fantasy. In some cases, she entertains two clients on the same day like a combine of lunch date with one client and dinner with someone else. The escort is expected to accompany the client to business conferences, parties, galas and any other activity organized by client or his company. The escort girls in these cases need to look like the girlfriend/partner of the client.
The man Moni (Santilal Mukherjee) who runs the agency is a mafia lord who wears kajal, pulls on a hookah and spends most of his time coochy-cooing with his much younger wife (Mumtaz Sorcar) who, according to one of the escort girls, “swings both ways.” She knows the magic of tying her shoe-laces for her regular work-out while she is brushing her teeth and talking on the phone at the same time. After all, she is P.C. Sorcar Junior’s daughter! One wonders why she has to take a taxi to go places when she readily takes out a wad of notes from her cupboard at the drop of a hat! She is also into drugs!! The agency is actually a front for using pretty girls to blackmail rich ‘clients’ with a libido on overdrive. So it is not an escort service agency at all!
Sen uses feather-light touches to sketch out his characters. Thus, they neither have a sense of history nor are they fleshed out enough to evoke empathy or have credibility. He has on the other hand, touched on many issues that detract from the main subject such as drug addiction, alternative sexuality, lunacy in bloodlines, rape, sexual harassment at the workplace, with those warning ribbons running down the bottom of the screen at frequent intervals. The songs are no good. The cuss words used directly and metaphorically have the effect of yesterday’s stale milk you forgot to keep in the ‘frig. The opening scene with the two young guys exchanging ideas about the difference between a near-ripe guava with a raw mango drawing parallels with a young girl is in very bad taste and does not justify the escort girls’ story in any way. Someone said that Sen wanted to break the linear narrative with this film. He has broken the film instead!
