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★★
Directed by: Charles Ross, Mukesh Asopa
Written by: Rajesh Asopa, Twinkle Asopa, Stephen Banko IV, Jessica Golding
Starring: Mukesh Asopa, Christine Saade, Lee Anne Ford
Chambers Gate commences quite strangely. First, you hear religious chants set against the names of the various production companies and then greeted with Film Review Board which says this film may contain violence, sexual content, and strong language. Then, in the end, after seeing an entire movie in English, you hear a song consisting of Hindi lyrics. What an odd shift in the mood it is. I almost laughed at it. This is, alas, the peak of my enjoyment. Chambers Gate, directed by Charles Ross and Mukesh Asopa, is so hell-bent on being “cool” that it forgets to be coherent.
It’s not every day I walk out of a film feeling dazed and wildly confused. If you were to ask me the plot of Chambers Gate, I would slap the IMDb summary on your windshield because I am not really sure what happened in the movie. I tried to clear my uncertainty by going through the IMDb summary, but that didn’t help either. So this is what I understood after viewing Chambers Gate (and reading IMDb): There is a government official named Jules Akola (Mukesh Asopa) who wants to eradicate crime from the streets. There are two criminals, Aaron (Dave Bath) and Moor (Khalid Klein). I am not sure what they were actually doing, but they are the most fun thing about this film. These two seem to be the only actors who got the correct memo on how to proceed with their roles. In the midst of heavy seriousness, this duo sprinkles joys of humor. When one tells the other to search the entire house, he replies, “The whole house?” Why couldn’t the others, and this film, share this sense of drollness? It would have imbued Chambers Gate with entertainment.
Instead, the whole affair comes across as unintentionally funny. The characters take themselves so seriously that you cachinnate and wish they would just cheer up already. When a cop asks Akola’s fiancé whether she would like to go out and continue with the interrogation, I was not expecting them to change their clothes and drive towards the beach! How is this not a parody? Watching Chambers Gate is like watching someone trying to hold their laughter so as to appear grave and solemn.
Another issue with Chambers Gate is that it doesn’t develop characters. It creates vague figures who follow the route set by the writers through the screenplay. Every action, every dialogue is stimulated by the words written on the pages of the script. There is no personality in any of the people in the film. Add to that the film’s “art house approach,” where it pretentiously shows a man walking on the road or views a waterfall from above or follows the cracks on the road. These shots appear more gaudy and straight out of a film school project. Chambers Gate, in the end, is cold and distant and locked.
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