Chased By Dreams
3BACK
_________________________________________

Review by Steve Gravestock of the Toronto International Film Festival

Paresh earns his living by taking educational films to remote areas in India. It's not exactly a job where self-esteem is one of the perks: most of the free screenings he hosts are met with derision or outright contempt. Despite the fact that he's working for what he and his government employers consider the public good, even his landlady considers him a shady character.
 
Paresh's temporary driver Chapal wants to take off to Dubai, in the hopes of a better life. En route to their first showing, they pick up Amina, a pregnant woman who hopes to make it to her unnamed homeland to have her child. But the border is heavily guarded and she has no papers or money. And the road is fraught with peril. As the film moves forward, the trio is increasingly put upon. They're robbed, virtually under their noses, and their appeals for help are met with a series of devious, decidedly small-minded cons.
 
On some levels, Buddhadeb Dasgupta's hypnotic Chased by Dreams plays like a Bengali version of Jean-Luc Godard's fabled apocalyptic nightmare Weekend. The crucial difference is the atmosphere and the sense of poetry which drive Dasgupta's film.
 
As anyone who's ever seen one of his works before knows, Dasgupta is one of the most tactile and elliptical filmmakers working today. When the characters bed down for the night, the air is ripe with promise, mystery and danger, not simply because of the hostile environment, but because of the emotions and connections the characters refuse to acknowledge in the daytime. In dreams, Paresh is visited by his ailing, long neglected father, while Amina dreams of her baby's death.
 
Despite its realist underpinnings, Chased by Dreams is near allegorical. What could be a better symbol for the artist in a world where art is undervalued or considered irrelevant than Paresh dragging his projector from one poorly received screening to the next? What could be a more disheartening index of the future than the stateless Amina? Chased by Dreams may share elements with fin de siecle masterpieces like Godard's, but if anything it's even more terrifying. At least with Godard, there was the sense of closure. Here, by implication, the road goes on forever.