Digital Review: ‘#Homecoming’ (SonyLIV)
Soumyajit Majumdar’s directorial debut #Homecoming is an ode to the spirit of Kolkata, its people, and its art community. With a massively talented ensemble cast of around 30 actors and a catchy soundtrack, he aims to shed a light on the Bengali theatre community.
A group of friends from an abandoned theatre troupe are suddenly invited to a reunion party seven years later. Their beloved theatre space is being converted to a hotel, so they decide to have one final hurrah. The lead actress Sri (Sayani Gupta) is now an indie darling, her former co-actor Imroze (Hussain Dalal) is a one-hit wonder. Shubho (Tushar Pandey) has sold out to the mainstream cinema world after telling Roopie (Tuhina Das) that theatre shouldn’t be a corporate endeavor. And the head stage manager Godot (Soham Majumdar), has abandoned both art and Kolkata, living now as a developer in San Francisco. Despite the deviating paths, they come together to grieve, reminisce, and find closure to the differences that tore them apart. Through these interpersonal dynamics, ‘#Homecoming’ succeeds in starting a conversation about theatre, identity, and artists.
The film has a compelling cast with interesting characters. Each person is confronted with how their life has changed in the past seven years, and they depict that turmoil in unique ways. They all have great chemistry with each other, along with relationships that are written with substance. The amount of effort that has been put into characterization is noticeable and commendable. These characters could have been two-dimensional stereotypes in the wrong hands, but Majumdar and his cast have fine-tuned them into living, breathing people. Gupta and Dalal are great as expected, but the truly engrossing moments of the film belong to Pandey and Das.
The disconnect lies in the way the plot unfolds on screen. ‘#Homecoming’ feels like 1hour 30 mins of people just narrating stories. The purpose, and advantage, of films is the visual aspect, the ability to tell by showing and not just by reciting dialogue. The film makes very little use of this. There are moments where the viewer could simply close their eyes and listen to the scene without losing any important detail of the plot. On this front, ‘#Homecoming’ truly feels like a missed opportunity because the potential and talent are all there.
