Rani Mukerji in Ms Chatterjee v Norway. (courtesy of zeestudiosofficial)
Pour: Rani Mukerji, Anirban Bhattacharya, Neena Gupta, Jim Sarbh, Tiina Tauraite
Director: Ashima Chibber
Evaluation: One and a half stars (out of 5)
A film that has its heart in the right place – it seems at first glance – should undeniably deserve generous applause. Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway directed by Ashima Chibber is not. Almost everything else in the overworked and grueling film, including the central performance by Rani Mukerji, is haywire.
The muddy melodrama centers on a mother’s agony at being separated from her children in a foreign land. The film does everything it can to portray an entire system of care as malicious and compromised. The outrageously bold strokes do little justice to the story of a desperate woman who was pushed against the wall and had no choice but to fight to be reunited with her children.
Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway is based on a true story. One can fully understand what the offended mother went through as she embraced a heartless system bent on beating her into submission. Unfortunately, the film never rings true because it is far too shrill and unsubtle.
Debika Chatterjee (Rani Mukerji) suffers the consequences of doing with her children – a two-year-old boy and a five-month-old girl – what most Indian mothers routinely do as parents. She cannot understand why hand-feeding a child is interpreted as force-feeding and used as an excuse to accuse her of being unfit to be a mother.
The film is primarily about a clash of cultures – the kind immigrants often encounter in their adopted countries – and its unfortunate consequences. The character’s brutal handling of the ordeal and her reaction to it turns her desperation into a spectacle. What could have been a real heart scream turns into a shrill scream.
Two Norwegian child welfare women who take Debika’s children away are portrayed as ruthless operators who give the Indian woman no chance at all to make her point before taking action. Debika begs and yells, but to no avail.
Rani Mukerji, a performer of proven skill, is disappointed with the writing. She struggles to hit the right notes. It alternates between rattling and noisy. As a result, the essence of the character never quite comes through.
When the 135-minute drama settles into a more controlled rhythm after about an hour and a half, Mukerji gets going. But given the turmoil the story of Debika’s perseverance in the face of daunting odds faced in the first half, there’s little for the film to salvage in the run-up to its climax.
The screenplay, written by Sameer Satija, Ashima Chibber and Rahul Handa, was adapted from a Kolkata woman’s published account of her struggles with Norway’s uncompromising child protection system. It’s too unpredictable to get the most out of the deeply emotional core of the story.
Uninhibited melodrama is the film’s favored mode, moving away from the possibility of capitalizing on a compelling real-life story. Of course, you want to empathize with Debika’s plight as she battles forces bent on destroying her, but the way the film stages the courtroom arguments – in Norway and Calcutta – the character develops doesn’t become a believable character, and neither does your story move audiences the way it should.
The film begins with Debika’s children being secretly driven away from their home in Stavanger in a government vehicle. She runs after the vehicle howling and yelling. Her son Shubho, a boy with an autism spectrum disorder, and daughter Shuchi, a toddler, are gone before she knows what hit her.
After being watched and interrogated for several days and a Norwegian government adviser investigating her behavior as a parent, Debika is told that her children cannot stay with her. Her husband, Aniruddha (Anirban Bhattacharya), an engineer, seems to support her but is too busy to really help.
The wronged woman does her cause little good by resorting to terribly desperate measures. The child support machinery weighs her down as she struggles to regain custody of her children. Some of her actions seem illogical, but understandable given the agony she’s in. So why can’t the film and the lady at its center not touch us emotionally?
Debika’s actions are often at odds with who she is – an educated woman who has lived in Norway long enough to appreciate the differences between her own culture and the Norwegian ethos. Instead of making Debika look like a resolute and brave mother, the film reduces her to a squeaky, volatile, and hyperventilating woman.
Such inconsistencies also derail the film’s two main male characters – Debika’s husband and a lawyer of Indian origin, Daniel Singh Ciupek (Jim Sarbh), who represents her in court. It’s difficult to figure out what they’re getting at. One moment they’re by Debika’s side, the next they’re not.
Anirban Bhattacharya and Jim Sarbh are accomplished actors. Her performances are far more sophisticated than the film as a whole. But Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway is a Rani Mukerji show. She’s the lone star here. She makes everyone else irrelevant.
In a film about a woman fighting for the good fight, the script doesn’t give the other women in the story any leeway at all. Neena Gupta has a fleeting guest appearance as India’s minister on a visit to Oslo to sign an Indo-Norwegian deal.
The two mothers – Debikas and Aniruddhas – are zeros. The former was written by Saswati Guhathakurta, the latter by Mithu Chakraborty. Both are Bengali TV and film veterans, but that doesn’t count for much here. One doesn’t even get an interjection, the other becomes a quarrelsome mother-in-law who rages and scolds and disappears in a few scenes.
For her part, Rani Mukerji rocks it and the film stumbles on its excesses. Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway is an overheated affair that sucks the air out of an otherwise moving story that deserves infinitely better.