Meanwhile, Joy seems to have met his match in Raima (Monami), a pretty air-hostess who has this bad habit of tossing a coin or playing ‘10 questions’ a famous guessing game to help her arrive at any decision. She is poised to fly away to the US for good but does not agree to change her decision unless Joy can answer her 10 questions. Joy cannot, and though he proposes marriage to her, she flies away, with tears in her eyes. Joy’s old ‘friend’ Saranya (Paoli Dam) has divorced her abusive husband and has come back to India. Will Joy marry her on the rebound? The director cooks up another reality show that will help the audience decide whether Joy will marry Saranya or not. The film ends on this open note.

Technical expertise
Anirudhha Bhattacharya has used almost every mass media of entertainment in Box No. 1313 as his film language. For the visual language, he has used animation to express an emotion, a candid camera reality show projected in a light, frothy way, an anchor from another show holding the different threads of the story as ‘anchor’ of the script, large-size newspaper ads on matrimonial used as wallpaper in the television studio, the laptop, photographs, and a reality television show with ‘celebrities’ sitting in as judges. In terms of audio, he has made use of the cell-phone and umpteen messaging, alongside the cerebral – the poetry of Sukumar Roy and Kazi Nazrul Islam, Satyajit Ray’s famous ‘ten questions’ game, and Joy’s band music that holds the theme song of the film.

Everything would have turned out just fine had he been able to hold the different strands of the script in control. Joy’s story is intercut with comments from his colleague Biswanath (Biswanath Bose), with his own ‘band’ that pops in and out of the script now and then, and with his unplanned and spontaneous encounters with the intelligent and independent-minded Raima. He loses control of the script with the slippery-fingered matchmaker and his three sophisticated, bad-mouthed versions of the Bandit Queen. It is the light-hearted, frothy and comic treatment used to tell a somewhat serious story that holds the film together. The film could be interpreted as a critique of arranged marriage, which could have really been a wonderful disclosure save for the disastrous judges of the reality show debating on who Joy will finally tie the knot with! Parambrato seems uncomfortable in some scenes while Paoli does well in a brief role.
Verdict
One star to the director for an extremely innovative script, another star for his imaginative handling and one star to two actors Monami and Paran Bandopadhyay for their wonderful performances.