An ensemble cast under direction of filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta pays poetic homage to modern day Kolkata, weaving tales both personal and epic in the triumphant Once Upon a Time in Calcutta.
In spite of the title’s inference, fairy tale this is not: it lives up to and evokes the two Sergio Leone films of similar names, and finds a pathway towards similar tragedy and loss.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2021
Once Upon a Time in Calcutta 2021
“Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Once Upon a Time in Calcutta opens with a death and ends with another. In between, the bustling metropolis... breathes and pulsates through a handful of characters that Sengupta's screenplay assembles on a vivid canvas...
Once Upon a Time in Calcutta is a portrait of a city not as an inanimate composite of its streets, hoods and buildings but as a giant living organism whose lifeblood are its denizens. Sengupta frames urban angst with empathy and an acute sense of reality and history, making [the film] an unsentimental and yet deeply felt ode to a constantly metamorphosing city.
Kolkata – the title opts for Calcutta to suggest continuum – assumes the form of a full-blown character that impacts, and is impacted by, the film's two principal figures. One is a former actress coming off the death of her daughter... and seeking to move on. The other is a depressive loner who clings desperately to a moribund theatre that he owns but no longer has any use for...
In Once Upon A Time In Calcutta, people seek to cloak their remembrances, regrets and resentments in their pursuit of love, happiness and survival. Faceless and forgotten... these people sum up a metropolis that itself is forever in quest of sustained stability.” — Saibal Chatterjee, NDTV.com