Gone Guy:
At a time when journalism is under a cloud, it is good to see an earnest, fools-rush-in kind of reporter as the protagonist in Lost (on ZEE5), directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, whose best known film is the pro-consent Pink (2016).
Lost is a film in search of a cause—throwing into the mix political and police corruption, caste, journalistic ethics, a Maoist agenda, street theatre, marital friction; the only all-purpose villain who does not make an appearance is a real estate developer! The film looks like it was truncated from a web series, losing out on character definition, development and crucial plot links.
Carrying on the tradition of idealistic journalists in Hindi movies (1986 film New Delhi Times, being the gold standard), Kolkata-based Vidhi Sahni (Yami Gautam Dhar) works for a news portal (the last bastion of media freedom). When first seen, she happens to be at a police station, when Namita (Honeyy Jaiin), accompanied by her husband Aman (Akshay Kapoor), has come to report the disappearance of her brother, Ishaan Bharti (Tushar Pandey).
It is not clear what kind of reporter she is, but she grabs on to the story like her job depended on it. The missing guy is labelled a Maoist by the cops; in a blink his TV anchor girlfriend Ankita Chauhan (Pia Bajpiee) has moved into a swanky apartment gifted by a politician, Ranjan Varman (Rahul Khanna), and given an MLA ticket. The plot covers seven months, during which time Ankita wins the elections, but Vidhi is still plodding over the story, digging into the bylanes of Kolkata (meticulously shot by Avik Mukhopadhyay), trying to trace the Maoist leader Rana (Kaushik Sen), confronting cops and the suave Varman, giving the viewer no clue as to exactly what she is investigating and why. Her editor Kunal (Suman Mukhopadhyay) must be the most patient man on earth.
Meanwhile, two clownish henchmen follow her around, try and fail to intimidate her grandfather (Pankaj Kapur), and send her threatening notes the old way—words cut from magazines glued to paper. For just a few minutes, Vidhi is scared enough to cover her head and wear sunglasses. With all her naïve bluster, Vidhi is not even aware that she is protected by the privilege offered by her wealthy parents and the grandfather, who is a former professor with enviable access to the corridors of power.
In between her pursuit of the story, which she insists is about missing people (even the series has a card at the end offering missing persons statistics), when there is murder and other evil going on around her, are the pleasant scenes of Vidhi and her grandfather, and the very civil quarrels with her estranged husband (Neel Bhoopalaman), who wonders why one Dalit guy turning to Maoism is such a big deal. Ishan, who is in the eye of the storm, remains a hazy figure, even though Vidhi has determined that he is a helpless waif, who needs rescuing.
The weakest character in the script (written by Shyamal Sengupta) is Ranjan Varman—you are expected to believe he is evil, because all politicians on screen are generically rotten—but he is not actually seen as involved in anything more wicked than coveting Ishan’s girlfriend, who was most willing to climb the social ladder. There are too many whys and hows left dangling in the air.
Yami Gautam Dhar does what she can with her sketchy role, and resists the temptation of playing Vidhi with a glowering intensity. Pankaj Kapur expectedly excels in his hackneyed Naanu role (played with exactly the same affectionate warmth by Amol Palekar in the recent Farzi). Other actors, particularly Rahul Khanna, and Bengali theatre and film actress Sohag Sen as Ishan’s mother (described as “wounded angel” by Vidhi) are wasted in roles that offer them nothing much to do.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)