Direction: Amartya Bhattacharyya
Country: India
Have you ever heard about Jean-Luc Godard movies being banned from a little village in India? Probably not, but this comedy written, directed and edited by Amartya Bhattacharyya fictionalizes that possibility with nearly cartoonish characters, cultural satire, and life-lesson intentions.
The plot follows Ananda (Choudhury Bikash Das), an old inhabitant from a small Indian village who has a reputation as a pervert. In truth, he is addicted to pornography, but that embarrassment changes on the day he gets to watch Godard’s masterpiece Breathless, which was given to him by mistake. From that moment on, he becomes so obsessed with the iconic French filmmaker that he proposes to organize a foreign film festival in an attempt to change the cultural torpor of the village. His friends are divided, whereas his studious daughter, Shilpa (Sudharsri Madhusmita), gets happy with the idea.
Armed with pragmatism in the execution (with the exception of the miscalculated fragments presented in color) and a compelling black-and-white cinematography, Adieu Godard lures at specific points but never hooks. The humor only works when the focus is on the confront between the festival organizers and the outraged villagers.
By planning to cover too many topics, the director makes his mockery inevitably episodic, scattered, and sometimes too histrionic to fully captivate. It’s like if he had got lost in the smoke of his inspiration’s auteurism, incapable of propelling the story beyond the minimum basics.
