This is not a review; I am writing this piece out of sheer disappointment.
2025 ended with two posters circulating across the streets of Assam. One is a sequel to the legendary film “Joubone Aamoni Kore,” which won the hearts of Assam in the late 1990s, and the other is by the renowned filmmaker Jahnu Baruah, who has garnered national and international acclaim through his works. When the posters were released, I, as a film aficionado, was excited for both of them, but when I watched them, it compelled me to think a lot about our teetering approach to storytelling.
“Joubone Amoni Kore 2,” which promised to bring back the legacy of the prequel after 25 years, failed to stand tall due to its poor story and execution. The film, which was supposed to bring nostalgia, brought a sense of letdown upon its release. I saw a bunch of people walk out of the hall in the middle of the film and comment on the sheer lack of logic. When a story is arranged without basic logic, a film may appear busy, but it is narratively inert. What we then see is not storytelling, but a series of disconnected incidents asking the audience to feel without giving them a reason to care.
Is this how we approach a film at a time when the quality of regional cinema in India is at its peak, and there is a real possibility of developing a substantial film industry in Assam as well? The main issue I noticed from watching “Joubone Aamoni Kore 2” is our lack of understanding of storytelling. We are confusing events with a story. Characters do things, songs appear suddenly, conflicts arise, but nothing connects or builds into something substantial.
That’s the issue with structure, and we are not following one. People might say structure kills creativity, but in an emerging film scenario like ours, I think that is just lazy thinking. In “Joubone Aamoni Kore 2,” the beginning, middle, and ending are just flat and don’t add up to anything, nor do the multiple characters that appear in the film. The film doesn’t fail emotionally, but narratively.
We require stories that have honesty, stories that can continue the basic narrative they wish to tell while also dealing with the other plots that come in the way of telling that particular story. A film must know what story it is telling before it decides what else to include. The problem arises when a story intends to inculcate multiple narratives just in the name of inclusion, or to broaden its moral stage, or to touch upon things that are in trend.
For instance, “Joubone Aamoni Kore 2,” like its prequel, simply could have been a love story of two characters (Rishi & Dubori), but they decided to introduce multiple themes: drug usage among youth, rural vs urban mindsets, then they jump into what later comes across as the core plot, the separation of Rishi’s parents and its impact on him. So the intention of these plots/themes seems to deliver a moral lesson to the audience.
The problem is not that multiple themes exist, but that there is no hierarchy among these themes, and the film never decides which one will drive the story. The plot surrounding drugs is shown without grounding, the love story resolves over a song, parental conflict is mechanical, and villains have so little to do in the plot. Everything in the film exists as episodes, not as something that progresses as a journey.
On a similar line, if we look at “Heruwa Chanda,” there are similar yet different flaws in the storytelling, which make the film less watchable, slower, and even boring. The film is based on a broken marriage, the ego clash between the characters within that marriage, a child who suffers in the middle, and primarily a woman (Kuhee) dealing with emotional instability and fading stardom due to growing age.
But the film attempts to tell its story only through articulation, meaning it relies primarily on dialogue, with multiple characters trying to persuade Kuhee that she was wrong in her relationship with her husband. It feels like Baruah did not put much effort into the action, which hinders narrative progression. The scenes keep repeating the same emotional information, and therefore, the conflict does not aggravate or mutate; instead, it just accumulates.
For the same reason, the primary character’s desire comes across as vague, and she mostly acts as an emotional subject rather than someone through whom the story progresses. A character’s desire usually creates direction, but in “Heruwa Chanda,” it leads us into a never-ending loop. Her decisions in the past keep returning in the present, which sounds like a valid way to approach storytelling, but it falters when the flashbacks keep emphasising emotions that are already established, rather than bringing something new to the table.
The climax of the film further exposes its storytelling limitations. Baruah, through secondary characters like Kuhee’s brother, her father, and her friend, establishes a moral ground, and these characters already articulate the ethical position of the film with certainty. For instance, Kuhee’s brother tells her that her over-reliance on technology will someday put her in danger and that her decision to separate from her husband is affecting her daughter.
All of this culminates in the climax, when she loses her phone and laptop on the same day, is late in picking up her daughter from school, and this entire mess leads her to approach her husband in panic. They finally come together to look for their daughter, and that resolves everything. So the climax conflict feels like an easy way out, and the crisis sounds more like a correction than a discovery. It feels procedural rather than revelatory, as the other characters have already hinted at it. It does not make the protagonist confront a new truth but pushes her to accept an old one.
So, if one looks at these two films, one finds that both falter terribly in storytelling. One overpowers the story with disconnected incidents and drains the soul of its prequel, while the other’s heavy emphasis on the repetition of emotional drive and moral clarification ruins the narrative. I believe what we need, in looking at these Assamese films, is self-introspection regarding the absence of a rigorously articulated structure and a desire to re-evaluate the intention behind our storytelling.
