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It’s difficult to believe that Gautam Ghosh actually made this film. Isn’t he the same filmmaker who made Dekha and more recently Abar Aranye, how can he stoop down to the level of Yatra? You’ve to watch it to believe me how bad the film actually is.

What better cast Gautam da needed, he had Rekha to play the courtesan and Nana Patekar for the writer, he had Dipti Naval. However all of them do a shoddy job and I don’t blame them, it’s the script and the direction. The characters they’re playing are not characters at all, they’re caricatures. They don’t have life of their own, only dada’s whims and fancies pull their strings, making them appear lifeless.

Story goes like this, Dashrath, a novelist falls for a courtesan after saving her life. She’s his inspiration for his new novel that wins him a national award. After receiving the award in Delhi, he heads straight to his muse and dies in her arms.

However it’s not as simple as it sounds here and it’s evident that dada loves and takes pain in complicating things. He deliberately stops the narrative flow and brings in Nana’s irritating narration that sometimes wanders into a discourse on the relationship between cinema and literature and god knows what not. The filmmaker seems hell bent upon not to spare a single issue, right from “materialistic culture” to loss of identity in call centers, communal riots, cleavage peeping perverts, MMS spreading young couples, nothing seems beyond the preview of the film.

The film turned out to be so torturous quite often that even the beautiful thumries and Rekha’s mujras kind of lost their charm.

Film is buried deep inside a stinking sense of nostalgia for a world that probably never existed. It’s highly cynical of everything contemporary and makes fun of things in a way that’s anything but funny.

Some beautiful cinematography but isolated and aloof from overall narrative structure.

Yatra is director’s such a self obsessed work that it’s hardly meant for any viewer. I wonder why dada expects anyone to watch it.