Thankfully, the movie has been declared a hit. So the distributors of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara should not really mind refunding my ticket money. However, the time that I wasted trying to catch this movie cannot be priced of course, so the distributors get lucky.
Lest you should think it is a movie review, let me assure you it is not. It has got nothing to do with the movie; it is all about the viewing. One Sunday, just after the movie had released in a hall in Santiniketan, a friend and I decided to watch it together to give her the mofussil movie-viewing experience. I called the movie hall and was told the show would start at 12.15 in the afternoon. However, on getting there we were told the movie would be played later in the day at 3.15. Instead, a Bengali movie was running at 12.15, which we definitely did not want to watch — “whoever was on the phone must have got it wrong” was the reply from the person at the counter.
Since my friend was returning to Kolkata the same day, we abandoned our plan. I went back another day after repeatedly checking the show timings. Once the movie started, we realised we couldn’t hear much of the dialogue. The audio quality was bad, which led to the youngsters in the audience screaming in protest — it meant the rest of us heard even less.
Just when we were getting used to tuning our hearing to the low volume, we realised that much of the sunny Spain, where the movie was picturised (apparently the selling point), was looking a dull grey-blue. By then it was pouring outside so we thought it would be wiser to watch a dull grey movie with muffled audio instead of venturing out in the rain.
Of course, people living in cities would say whatever we got was good for the ridiculously low ticket price of Rs 35. But it is not the typical mofussil movie hall. A swank building, one of the public/private enterprise initiatives by former Speaker and MLA from the region Somnath Chatterjee, it was franchised to one of Kolkata’s allegedly more professional distribution company.
Since it is the only movie hall in the town, and a pretty good one at that, I was so dismayed that I called the manager on getting back home. When I asked him about the problem with the audio, he admitted that much of the equipment was malfunctioning and had been sent for repair. So if we caught a little less of the Senorita song, it was only because three-fourths of the Dolby audio system were missing!
When I asked if it was ethical to show a movie without a proper audio system, he said keeping the hall closed for repairs would actually be unfair to the “public”. When asked about the video, he said the distribution company from Kolkata had already shown the movie in two halls before its release in Santiniketan, so the print was affected. I felt I was in a time warp. Are digital prints affected like the spool tapes of yester years? Moreover, the movie had released on the 15th of the month and I watched it on the 19th. So how could the distributor have shown it elsewhere within the same week?
The manager was obviously not used to aggressive women throwing logic at him over the phone. When I said he must be making a mistake since there was no way the movie could have been shown elsewhere before being released nationally, his comeback had me stumped. “Why are you asking all these questions,” he said “do you have any enmity with us?”