Trikal: Past Present and Future

A potentially intriguing return for Shyam Benegal to the last days of colonialism in India, this time involving not the Raj but the Portuguese colony of Goa. Politically critical but elegiacally cast as a sort of latter-day Cherry Orchard (the setting is a fading mansion with the Indian army lurking at the off-screen gates), it is disappointingly pedestrian, with few of the subtle reverberations and sharp perceptions that marked Benegal's earlier Junoon.