Din Ratrir Golpo review: Rajatava Dutta's act only engaging part of this absurd film

Prosenjit Choudhury’s film Din Ratrir Golpo (2020) comprises of two stories. The first is apparently a story about  a day, while the second is about a night. The connection comes across in the second story, which can be called a horror story, but without any twists. In the first story, day signifies a sense of hope.

Suzanne (Supriti Choudhury), a nun, has a seizure while playing the piano in a church. On her deathbed, she makes a confession about two incidents in her life, one which imparted hope, and the other, which forced her to hide a crime. 

If one compares the two stories, the second comes across as slightly less absurd because of Rajatava Dutta’s eerie act, the recreated ambience and the climax. So even though there is no sense of anticipation in the plot of a horror story that primarily deals with death, the slightly better written dialogues establish Dutta’s obsession with death and all the practices associated with it.

The fate of a man, who boasts of having championed death, at the end of the story is convincing too. However, in the beginning of the story, Dutta’s comment of drunkard men harassing Suzanne with her consent is quite problematic.

In the first story, Suzanne learns how a dying person can face death by recreating moments of being alive in someone else’s life. It is as confusing as it sounds. Arunima (Rayati Bhattacharya)’s parents learn that she has been sent to Mars on a one-way mission. They are devastated and find it difficult to believe that NASA would send someone on such a mission.

However, the effect begins to wear out when they get to see a recorded video of Arunima from the spacecraft, in which she promises to send them videos as long as she can, twice a year.

Suzanne here can be seen in the avatar of a member on a secret mission from NASA, who informs Arunima’s parents about her journey to Mars. It is left to the audience to figure out how Suzanne eventually finds inspiration to celebrate life, even as death approaches Arunima.

Suzanne seems to deliberately draw this essence of hope from the incident and expresses it in heightened monologues, which makes the idea of recreating moments of being alive seems ludicrous. Arunima's dialogues and the sequence of her floating inside the spacecraft, makes the story unintentionally hilarious. Also, there are repetitive dialogues throughout the sequence, which is tiresome. 

Though Choudhury has a strong screen presence, she mostly delivers her monologues as if reciting poetry. Bhattacharya fails to infuse authenticity in her sequence of floating inside the spacecraft, which is understandable, as the entire act seems caricaturish.

Pradip Mukherjee, Rumki Chatterjee and Debesh Roy Chowdhury have tried to deal with the script with utmost sincerity. However, it is Dutta, who enlivens the second part of the film with his weird body language and terrifying facial expressions. 

Mrinmoy Chakraborty’s cinematography is extremely flat, especially in the first story. Mostly, he has just tried to accommodate the characters in a frame. In the second story, the lighting and production design of Dutta’s room, divert attention from the insipid cinematography. 

Honestly, apart from these absurd motifs and a seemingly logical climax, Din Ratrir Golpo has nothing to offer the audience. It is hard to decipher how the director could think of telling a story about human relationships and death as a moment of celebration, through these two stories.