Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway: A Well-Intentioned Film That Falls Short

Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway: A Well-Intentioned Film That Falls Short

Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway is a film directed by Ashima Chibber, starring Rani Mukerji, Anirban Bhattacharya, Neena Gupta, Jim Sarbh, and Tiina Tauraite. The film is based on a true story of an Indian mother, Debika Chatterjee, who fights the Norwegian Child Welfare Services to regain custody of her two children. Despite the film's heart being in the right place, the film is an overwrought and exhausting experience that fails to do justice to the story of a distraught mother pushed to the wall and left with no option but to fight to be reunited with her children. The film gets a one and a half-star rating out of five.

The film is primarily about a clash of cultures, the sort that immigrants often encounter in their adopted countries, and its unfortunate fallout. Debika Chatterjee (Rani Mukerji) suffers the consequences of doing with her children - a two-year-old boy and a five-month-old girl - what most Indian mothers tend to routinely do by way of parenting. She is unable to understand why feeding a child with her hand would be construed as force-feeding and used as a pretext to accuse her of being unfit to be a mother. The film does everything that it can to paint an entire foster care system as malicious and compromised. The brazenly broad strokes do little justice to the story.

Two women from Norway's Child Welfare Services who take Debika's children away are projected as unscrupulous operators who give the Indian lady no chance at all to get her point across before they swing into action. Debika begs and bawls but to not avail. The heavy-handed treatment of the character's ordeal and her response to it turns her despair into a spectacle. What could have been a genuine cry from the heart turns into a shrill shriek in the process.

Rani Mukerji, a performer of proven ability, is let down by the writing. She struggles to hit the right notes. She shifts back and forth between the rattled and the raucous. As a result, the essence of the character never quite comes through. When the 135-minute drama, about an hour and half in, settles into a somewhat more controlled rhythm, Mukerji gets into her stride. But in the light of the mauling that the story of Debika's perseverance in the face of daunting odds has been subjected to in the first half, there is little left for the film to salvage in the run-up to the climax.

The screenplay by Sameer Satija, Ashima Chibber, and Rahul Handa has been adapted from a Kolkata woman's published account of her brush with Norway's uncompromising child protection system. It is too erratic to be able to make the most of the deeply emotional core of the story. Unrestrained melodrama is the film's preferred mode, which drags it away from the possibility of capitalizing on a persuasive real-life story.

The film opens with Debika's children being surreptitiously driven away in a government vehicle from her Stavanger home. She runs after the vehicle, howling and hollering. Her son Shubho, a boy with an autistic spectrum disorder, and daughter Shuchi, a toddler, are gone before she knows what has hit her. After she has been observed and questioned over several days and a Norwegian government counsellor has examined her ways as a parent, Debika is told that her children cannot be left with her.

Her husband, Aniruddha (Anirban Bhattacharya), an engineer, appears to be supportive but has way too much on his mind to be of much help. The wronged lady does not do her cause much good by