Rahul is an architect—a creator of planned spaces. She represents the logos, the blueprint, the desire to impose order on chaos. Her brother, living in the ruins, has become the chatrak himself: a wild, spontaneous life form thriving in the cracks of the city’s failed promises. He does not build; he inhabits. He does not produce; he simply exists. The film suggests that true freedom might not lie in building higher or moving faster, but in the radical act of stopping, of refusing to participate, and of becoming a silent, organic witness to the decay. The mushroom, after all, feeds on death. And so does the brother.
Vimukthi Jayasundara’s Chatrak stands as a bold critique of the urban condition in 21st-century South Asia. It challenges the narrative of India’s "shining" economic rise by focusing on the debris left in its wake.
The film is dominated by shades of green and grey, evoking a sense of mold and moisture. This visual strategy mirrors the title, Mushrooms , suggesting that the city is a damp, fertile ground for parasitic growth. The structures do not look lived-in; they look consumed. This is a departure from the warm, golden tones of Satyajit Ray’s Kolkata or the gritty realism of Mrinal Sen’s city; Jayasundara’s Kolkata is a cold, alien landscape. bengali movie chatrak
The sexual encounters in the film are devoid of intimacy; they are desperate, almost violent attempts to feel something real in an increasingly artificial environment. The female body in the film is often framed as a landscape—mysterious, tactile, and vulnerable. The controversy distracted from the film’s deeper commentary on the commodification of desire in a neoliberal economy. The characters use sex as a means to bridge the vast emotional distance between them, but the act ultimately fails to save them from their isolation.
This structural ambiguity reflects the psychological state of the protagonist. Rahul is displaced; his memories of the city do not match the reality. The disjointed narrative mimics the experience of returning to a homeland that has been irrevocably altered by globalization. It is a cinema of mood and atmosphere, where the objective is to immerse the viewer in the protagonist's disorientation rather than to explain it. Rahul is an architect—a creator of planned spaces
The most defining characteristic of Chatrak is its visual language. Jayasundara, collaborating with cinematographer Francois Catonne, paints Kolkata in the hues of a hallucination. The camera lingers on textures—damp walls, moss, peeling paint, and endless concrete.
Cinematographically, Chatrak is a triumph of mood over matter. The camera work by Chintan Gandhi is intimate yet detached, often observing the characters from a distance, as if through a window or across a chasm. The color palette is desaturated—grays, browns, washed-out greens—mirroring the pollution and dust of urban Kolkata. But within this monochrome reality, there are moments of startling, almost surreal beauty: the brother lying on a pile of sand, the rain soaking the unfinished floors of the high-rise, the slow, deliberate smoking of a joint as the sun sets behind a forest of cranes and scaffolding. He does not build; he inhabits
In a remote jungle near the border, the brother lives a nomadic life, subsisting on vegetation and sleeping in trees. He befriends a European soldier (Tómas Lemarquis), and their wordless interaction serves as a surreal counterpoint to the rapid, unplanned construction taking over the city. The "Chatrak" Controversy
The film follows Rahul (Sudip Mukherjee), a non-resident Indian architect returning to Kolkata after a decade in the West. He arrives to find his hometown unrecognizable, caught in a frenzy of construction and destruction. As he searches for his missing brother, who has fled societal expectations to live in a strange, subterranean existence, the narrative dissolves into a series of sensory experiences rather than a cohesive plot.
"Chatrak" is a Bengali drama film that revolves around the lives of four friends - Shubho, Rana, Tushar, and Boby. The story takes place in Kolkata, where the four friends are struggling to find their place in the world. Shubho (played by Prosenjit Chatterjee) is a middle-aged man who is unhappy with his job and feels suffocated by his mundane life. Rana (played by Kharaj Mukherjee) is a self-centered businessman who only cares about his own interests. Tushar (played by Bantinder Singh) is a young and ambitious entrepreneur who wants to make a name for himself. Boby (played by Anuradha Chakraborty) is a free-spirited woman who is searching for her true love.
At its heart, Chatrak is a scathing critique of the real estate boom that transformed Kolkata in the early 21st century. The film was shot during a period of massive urban expansion, where villages on the periphery were being swallowed by satellite townships, and old heritage buildings were being bulldozed for shopping malls. The half-constructed buildings in the film are not just sets; they are real monuments to speculative greed—structures that were started with loans, left unfinished due to market crashes, and now stand as hollow tombs of ambition.