At the center of Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Janala (Window) is a young couple, Bimal (Indraneil Sengupta) and Meera (Swastika Mukherjee) who decide to get married on learning that Meera is pregnant. Bimal and Meera are very much in love and cannot look past each other.

Bimal, who works as a caretaker at a nursing home, is transformed when he visits his childhood school. Recalling sweet childhood memories of him as he walks through the dilapidated building, Bimal is saddened by the state of his alma mater. As he gazes at the broken window from which he gazed into his future that promised to be as exciting as the geography lessons his ears caught, Bimal is filled with the desire to do something for the place where he grew up. Although he is not financially stable and with his marriage just around the corner, Bimal decides to donate a window to the school.

From that moment on, in his desperate attempt to do something meaningful, Bimal distances himself from his own existence; he skips work, withdraws most of his savings from his joint account with Meera, and looks at nothing beyond the ornate design on the window. Bimal returns to his school with the window, but the school staff refuse to accept a meaningless gift. With the help of a sweet trucker, Bimal tries to find a place that would “accept” his gift, but he can’t find a wall for his window.

Almost fable-like, Janala operates with a variety of metaphors and has its moments, but they are very rare and in between. The metaphors the script ends up relying on become a bit overbearing past one point and with major characters like Meera staying the same throughout the film, Janala becomes a tedious clockwork. Janala’s characters are lifted straight from real life and while this makes them seem real, they feel incomplete as most of them operate in extreme blacks or whites.

Indraneil Sengupta’s stunning presence and loyalty to the character make Bimal the fulcrum of the film. Although Bimal is the most defined character in the film, Sengupta brings a bit more to enhance Bimal.

Janala’s script leaves Meera gasping for air from the start and, like the Swastika Mukherjee script, it also doesn’t make any real effort to make Meera stand out.

One of the biggest problems with Janala is how Dasgupta handles Meera. Bimal is a dreamer who prefers to live with the idea of ​​how the past could have been better and although he is planning a new life with Meera, he cannot help but remain aloof. Meera, on the other hand, only dreams of a future that she vows to make beautiful and happy. Meera never dissuades Bimal beyond a point in his pursuit of something good for his school, but once Bimal decides to go ahead with the plans to make the window, it starts to create a void between them and Meera just doesn’t do anything. There are cases where Bimal doesn’t answer her phone for two days and even then Meera just doesn’t do anything. This drift between them could have been better explored or used to add some resonance to Meera’s character.

Janala is a bittersweet story of what happens in the heart of our country. Dasgupta’s images transport us to the place where the heart of this story lies, but once he takes us there, we end up looking for the heart that seems to be missing.

Janala’s rating: 2/5

Janala Cast: Indraneil Sengupta and Swastika Mukherjee

Janala Written and Directed by: Buddhadeb Dasgupta