The much-awaited Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is like one of those gargantuan buffet spreads which looks spectacular from a distance but once you keep moving from counter to counter, from one steam pan to another, you realise there’s nothing really to fill your plate.
Dibakar Banerjee has strange ways of operating. When he adapted Vassilis Vassilikos’s book Z into Shanghai, he borrowed more from Costa Gavras’s film. When he turned Satyajit Ray’s Potol Babu Filmstar into his Bombay Talkies short, he also slyly inducted Pterodactyl-er Dim towards the end. And now for Byomkesh, having bought the rights of all the Sharadindu Bandopadhyay stories, he has concocted an all-new tale altogether.
Because maybe in the Bollywood scheme of things it’s not enough for a neighbourhood truth-seeker to solve a little-known case about a family. He has to dig deeper and spread wider. He has to save nations and stop wars. And stand with his back to the camera overlooking a city he protects. Like a superhero, the dhoti his cape.
There’s a bit of Satyanweshi in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! and some of Sharadindu’s characters are there. Besides Byomkesh himself, there’s Ajit and there’s Satyawati. But if you try to trace these characters back to the original stories, you would be lost in the dusty old pages and emerge nowhere. While by the end of it they do become his partner-in-crime-solving friend and his wife respectively, they fit the new plot in new ways. Even Puntiram seems to have Chinese blood in him.
We are taken to Vidya Sadhan College in Calcutta 1943 where Ajit (Anand Tiwari) requests (and then slaps) the strapping Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) to find out about his chemist father who has been missing for a couple of months. Known on campus for his beautiful mind, Byomkesh is shown nursing a broken heart, the Bond template perhaps used to explain why he is so easily seduced in the next few minutes of the film.
Byomkesh takes up the case and his search for Ajit’s father leads him to several parallel plots, from local political enmities to cross-border opium smuggling, and to colourful characters, from the homoeopath Anukul Guha (Neeraj Kabi) to the popular actress Anguri Devi (Swastika Mukherjee). Since everything happens during the Second World War when Japan is trying to attack the British forces in India, the task at hand for Byomkesh just keeps multiplying.
The film can sure be looked upon as the birth of the detective, who at the start is a clumsy and curious adventure seeker, someone who can’t even look at blood oozing. But then again the film is too much in love with its own serpentine plotting to pan the spotlight on the growth in the sleuth. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! the film always tries to be more clever and smart than Detective Byomkesh Bakshy the character.
It’s difficult to understand what Dibakar was trying to achieve. Why take a famous literary character and turn him around? Why adapt a book and write a fresh plot? The reimagined scenario is way too complicated and still very verbose, with the prolonged detective denouement playing out across a round table where the entire plot has to be still explained by Byomkesh to the other characters. And the rock band-peppered background music —which made many to deduce from the trailer that it’s a Sherlock-esque adaptation — doesn’t mix very well with the period images.
The acting, though, is top notch from the entire cast. Sushant dives smoothly into the period milieu and yet emerges as a hero who can be still relevant. Anand Tiwari is just right as the revised Ajit who can slap his Byomkesh and yet jump into the fire to save him. In her first Bollywood film, Swastika Mukherjee is terrific as the temptress who is a slave of her aching heart. Neeraj Kabi, the monk from Ship of Theseus, is effective for the first two hours of the film and then switches into an unexplainable mode of hamming and howling.
The best thing about the Byomkesh Bakshi stories and why there is still an audience for them, and what must have enthralled the 11-year-old Dibakar Banerjee reading the books in Delhi, is their simplicity and ingenuity. From a gramophone pin being fired from a cycle bell to tarantula’s venom being sucked from the nib of a fountain pen, if someone just read from the books on screen, you’d find a rapt audience.
That’s where Basu Chatterjee scored on television. That’s why Anjan Dutt is on to his fourth Byomkesh film. Their adaptations might have had zero production values and often streams of shoddy acting but they had life and they had heart. Dibakar could have learnt from Rituparno Ghosh, who too tried to rewrite Sharadindu and failed. Maybe in the sequel he’ll bring back Detective Byomkesh Bakshy to the pages of the books where he was born.
DETECTIVE BYOMKESH BAKSHY! (U/A)
Director: Dibakar Banerjee
Cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Anand Tiwari, Swastika Mukherjee,
Divya Menon, Neeraj Kabi, Meiyang Chang
Running time: 150 minutes
Pratim D. Gupta
What did you like/not like about Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!?Tell t2@abp.in
SWASTIKA MUKHERJEE SHINES IN SEVEN SCENES, HIGHLIGHTED BY A STUNNING ENTRY AND A GLORIOUS EXIT. T2 SPOTLIGHTS SWASTIKA WITHOUT PLAYING SPOILSPORT!
1. Swastika’s femme fatale Anguri Devi looms into Byomkesh Bakshy’s view as he slips into the premises of an abandoned factory. Byomkesh stares transfixed as Anguri Devi, standing on the edge of a jetty overlooking the Hooghly, slips off her baby-pink wrap and plunges into the water. As Byomkesh stares on, Anguri Devi tells her giggling assistant: “Dekhne de… kabhi dekha nahin hai lagta hai.” Stung, Byomkesh looks away and the camera cuts to a shot of Swastika’s legs walking up the jetty and slipping on a skirt over her black swimsuit.
What we liked: As the camera moves up — she slips on a shoe with her leg perched on the bonnet of a vintage car — to give us the first glimpse of Anguri Devi’s face: arresting, seductive… and privy to a million dark secrets.
2. Anguri offers Byomkesh a ride in her car. As she drives, Byomkesh bombards her with questions about the murder, but she doesn't give anything away, save a slight nervousness as she clutches on to her purse.
What we liked: The John Lennon glares and that stunning Marsala lipstick that becomes Anguri’s trademark.
3. Byomkesh — dressed in a suit to impress — lands up at Anguri’s home. Her assistant leads him to the bathroom where Anguri is a vision in a bathtub. He flinches and hides behind the partition, but she coaxes him to sit near the bathtub.
What we liked: Anguri pulling Byomkesh close and smelling the material of his suit. The seductive undertones in this scene set up the kiss in the next.
Yes, let’s leave you hanging right there. To find out more about the chemistry of A(nguri) and B(yomkesh), go watch the film.
Priyanka Roy
