A Winter Tale At Shimla Review: Mature Love Story Sans Love

A WINTER TALE IN SHIMLA

Producer-Director: Yogesh Varma

Cast: Indraneil Sengupta, Deepraj Rana, Gauri Pradhan, Rituraj Singh

Platform of Release: Theatres

Rating:

By Jyothi Venkatesh

The film is a bold tale of enduring love, where two individuals reunite in the picturesque town of Shimla, twenty years after their initial encounter. It is a mature but sensible mature love story where a man meets his long lost love after two decades .The rekindled affair could be ruinous, for the jealous husband who is a DIG Police Officer, a brute with an unenviable reputation.

However, when the woman’s (Gauri Pradhan) possessive husband (Deepraj Rana) catches wind of a potential affair, the delicate balance of their relationship suddenly takes an unforeseen turn. However, what I like about the film is the fact that the director has focussed on presenting a story that revolves around their doomed love rather than thrilling escapades.

The film commences with a gripping incident where the old flame who is now renowned professor Chintan Kapoor (Indraneil Sengupta) narrowly escapes a car attempting to collide with him during his routine morning walk, resulting in an accident. Chintan has relocated to Shimla at the insistence of his friend Naveen Shergill (Rituraj Singh), who has recently established an institute combining Vedic practices with management studies.

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When Chintan reunites with his former love, Vaidehi (Gauri Pradhan), who now also has a young teenage daughter with her cop husband, old sparks are reignited, albeit not at all in a conventional romantic sense. However, Vaidehi’s husband, Uday (Deepraj Rana), becomes suspicious of their connection and suspects that an illegal extra marital affair is still brewing between both of them and so much so that Uday’s jealousy reaches even to such an extreme extent that he resorts to kidnapping Chintan’s granddaughter as a means to teach him a lesson.

The offbeat narrative oscillates between the past and the present, with the past solely focusing on the doomed love story between Chintan and Vaidehi. And also unfortunately, the present timeline fails to provide substantial sequences depicting encounters between the two ill-fated lovers, which could easily inject doubts into Uday’s mind.

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As far as the performances go, Indraneil Sengupta and Gauri Pradhan (who makes her debut in films as an actor after a long innings on the small screen for a long time) deliver brilliant as well as decent performances as Chintan and Vaidehi, respectively, though Deepraj Rana, in the role of a senior police officer, occasionally goes overboard and over melodramatic with his portrayal. Rituraj Singh’s character is unfortunately half-baked and incorporated unnecessarily in the film to add to the drama as such

Though writer-director Yogesh Varma’s screenplay as well as Alok Dhara’s editing leave a lot to be desired, in the process making the film extremely slow paced, it is worth watching, thanks to mature performance by Gauri Pradhan and soulful and soothing music by Avyc Dutta