A poster of the film

Cannes, May 25: Just about the only Bengali film in which buyers in the Cannes Market have expressed an interest this year is Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs, according to Rohit Sharma, the sales agent for the movie.

Called Ami, Yasin Aar Amar Madhubala in Bengali and The Voyeurs for the overseas market, it is just the kind of off-beat movie that could have benefited from the presence of its director and its lead actors, Prosenjit Chatterjee and Bollywood star Sameera Reddy, in Cannes.

“The film has not been released in India,” informed Sharma, who does not like handing out DVDs of films for fear of piracy but was happy to give one to The Telegraph.

Actually, there is little danger of such copies being pirated because the words, “For personal viewing only”, causes great irritation by going across the screening several times a minute.

Sharma, who is president, international sales, of IDream, a company registered in the UK for tax purposes, said buyers for his films — this year they include Tahaan, “a feel good story set in the Kashmir Valley”, and The Voyeurs — said he specialised in “non-Bollywood” and that his buyers were mostly European interested in the art house genre.

The Voyeur, which has had one market screening in Cannes, is deemed by some critics who have seen the film to have commercial prospects.

The pitch made by Sharma is as follows: “Sameera Reedy, who is Rekha in the film, comes to Calcutta to become an actress — she is also a dancer. She has rented an apartment in the same building (where) Prosenjit is staying. Sameera is not Bengali but she has learnt Bengali — as far as I know it’s her voice.”

He went on: “Prosenjit Chatterjee, the son of the famous actor Biswajeet, plays the neighbour: he works as a surveillance camera kind of guy. He goes and meets Sameera (Rekha) and he likes her. He thinks she is his Madhubala — Prosenjit is obsessed with Madhubala. He says she is more beautiful than Madhubala.”

He described the plot: “He is keeping track of her. She also likes him but tragic events follow — she discovers that he has put in a camera and tells the police and the cops come and he runs away. At the same time, a bunch of terrorists have come to Calcutta and there is a bomb explosion, and the cops mistake them to be terrorists. There is no happy ending.”

The film did not fit into a stereotypical niche: “It is not a love story, it is not a murder mystery, it is in-between everything.”

When buyers come in to discuss one film, Sharma, ever the shrewd businessman, tries to sell them three as part of a package deal. “It is good for them, it is good for us.”

After watching the film, The Telegraph can elaborate a little on the tale: in the movie, Prosenjit acquires a roommate, a Muslim boy, Yasin (Amitabh Bhattacharya), who has come to Calcutta from Behrampore where the two friends’ families have long been amicable neighbours.

Dilip and Yasin while away hour after silent hour watching their free peep show on their TV monitor. Yasin is baffled when Dilip switches off the screen just as Rekha is about to unclip her bra.

Then it dawns on him that Dilip now finds Rekha even more beautiful than Madhubala and that lust has turned into love.

The tale turns to tragedy when Rekha discovers the spy camera in her room, tells another neighbour who informs the police, forcing Dilip and Yasin to go on the run. Unfortunately for Yasin, he resembles a member of an Islamic terrorist gang being hunted by the police.

When the two friends are caught by the police, there can be only end for Yasin, the victim of mistaken identity — in customary Indian fashion, he is “encountered”. Dilip is lucky — he is let off with a severe thrashing in lock up.

Variety gave the film a good write-up when it was shown last year at the Toronto Film Festival.

“With an exceptional capacity for irony-tinged tenderness toward his characters, an unerring sense of where to place his widescreen camera and an ability to expand small-scaled stories into accounts of what it means to live in the modern world, Bengali director Buddhadeb Dasgupta adds another fine work to his impressive film ography with The Voyeurs,” its critic, Robert Koehlerr, said.

He noted: “Two small rooms are more than enough for Dasgupta to create a world of rich and conflicting moods and emotions, filmed (care of Sunny Joseph’s cinematography) with humanistic expressiveness.”

He felt that “the way Dasgupta is able to shift from light-hearted reflection, magic realism and a man’s seemingly absurd pursuit of love to personal and social catastrophe — not unlike many of his previous films, including the superb Chased By Dreams — is an assured example of storytelling artistry. Central three actors provide lovely portraits of outsiders trying to somehow connect and make it in the big city.”