A BLOCKBUSTER FILM FULL OF POTHOLES

NAME: Thabaton 
PRODUCER: Surjitkanta Ningthoukhongjam 
 DIRECTOR: Bijgupta Laishram
 CAST: Kaiku, Gokul, Sushmita GENRE: Romance, Drama

          With Thabaton, director Bijgupta has again come up with a romantic drama targeting the teen masses at large. Like his previous film Luhongbagi Ahing, he has done the scripting and the lyrics. In his films one can feel the importance of marriage as a social institution with the female lead actress portrayed as a victim of social norms.

                The film opens with Thabaton eloping with Yaima during Yaosang (Holi) festival. Thaba and Yaima are the youngest in their respective families however she comes from a middle class family and Yaima’s father is a rich special contractor. Both the family stands against their relation due to difference in social status and their tender age. Moreover the family hatred deepens when both Thaba and Yaima’s brothers are killed in the family dispute. Just few days after their marriage, Yaima goes to Delhi for the Master’s degree. At home Thaba is ill-treated by her in laws and even after she attends motherhood she is sent back at her maternal home on the excuse of Yaima’s false death. Back at home, her father dies of heart attack on hearing her misfortune. In the second half she joins office in place of her father and meets Yambung as an education officer. She ends up marrying him under pressure. Things get complicated when Yaima returns back home and find Thaba as someone else’s wife.

                The film tries to show that hatred does no good to anyone. But love and mutual understanding is the solution of all problems. Moreover it also shows that money with power makes a person arrogant and thoughtless through the character portrayal of Yaima’s father.

                The film is divided into two sections: the first part focuses on Thaba’s tangled family relations. And the second part centres on her new found love. In the early part of the film Thaba and Yaima are shown quite unaffected to on-going family dispute. Even though their brothers’ get killed in the family dispute a single moment is not spare to lament the lost. The part when Thaba holds back Yaima from joining the fight between their brothers resembles Helen holding back Prince Paris from joining the Trojan War. The bathroom scene in the second half of the film is too much for the audience to digest. The background score needs to be smooth and tune in with the on-going visuals.  Because the scene when Thaba gets the appointment letter she feels sad along with happiness remembering her father, but there is a jerk between the cheerful tune and the sad one. The music that ought to melt the audience’s heart seems drifting away at the wrong direction.

                Bijgupta’s Thabaton have successfully melt hundreds of teenagers with Gokul and Sushmits’s romance. For a new comer Susmita has done quite well and for Gokul he continues to steal hundreds of heart. besides her singing skill she she is quite talented to be an actor. But there are many potholes in the story, still people can go and enjoy the film.