Sandcastle (2012)

Directed by: Shomshuklla Das
Country: India

Movie Review: “Sandcastle” is the first film written and directed by Shomshuklla Das (also poet and singer), resulting in a personal vision about the role of women in Indian society. The film starts to introduce us Sheila (Shahana Chatterjee), a successful writer, exposing her thoughts by a long monologue about freedom and how to find the ideal man. That's when Maya (Malvika Jethwani), created from Sheila’s imagination, gained life of her own. In the next scenes we understand that Sheila is disappointed with her marriage; she starts taking advices from her brother, the fictitious Maya, and also from her real friend and publisher, Koushik. With constant social pressures, what will Sheila decide to do about her private life and work, which is always under judgment? Despite the valid idea, the film gives the answers to this question in a disjointed way, using long, dense, and unsatisfactory dialogues that made me disconnect completely from the characters. This aspect was reinforced by the constant changing of chapters (in a total of 20), breaking down the flow of happenings. Repeated close-ups of feet, food, and hands, were used in an attempt to approximate viewer and protagonists, but this tactic only distracted me from the central point of the debates. With theatrical tones and an almost amateurish style, “Sandcastle” weighs tradition and emotion without a favorable outcome, losing itself in spiritual and literary considerations that were never exciting or even inspired.