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A scintillating synthesis of the cerebral and the sensual Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is an enigmatic whodunit cooked on the slow burner at a tantalizing temperature. Dibakar Banerjee’s Kolkata pulsates with a heart, soul, body and nerves of steel. This is a world whose existence the makers of Furious 7 could never imagine. It’s a difficult world to inhabit. But once you are in, you are in it for good.
As layer after layer of intrigue and mystery are peeled off this Chinese puzzle of a movie, you are finally left staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at a work of wondrous art. Exquisite in form, compelling, and at times deeply impenetrable in content Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (DBB) is what a whodunit was meant to be all along. Somehow Hindi cinema never got down to doing a real murder mystery before this. Maybe the genre waited to be cracked by the deftly disingenuous Dibakar Banerjee. To get to the bottom of that mystery- of why the murder mystery never came to fruition before this – we must wait for the film on the desecration of the whodunit in Bollywood.
DBB is a stubbornly placid tale of an iconic detective who seems to know more about Kolkata and its underworld than any authority of or on the metropolis in the 1940s. The film’s writers, and I do mean Urmi Juvekar and Dibakar Banerjee and not Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, who penned the original detective novels, lend a gripping flow to the narrative by bending the plot into shapes which are not recognizable or definable by the rules of the genre, at least, not the way we’ve so far perceived the murder mystery in Bollywood.
Smells, sights, and sounds emerge from the storytelling with a casual flair for making the obvious look subtle and the innocuous and dangerous.
Wickedly misleading and yet resolutely clear-headed, even as the detective-hero and his reluctant assistant Ajit Banerjee (Anand Tiwari) gambol from one suspect to another to piece together a mystery that has no reference point and certainly no history, this is a film that requires us to abandon all attempts to be one-up on the narrative.
We have no choice but to go with the writer’s whimsical flow.
From the seeming ebbing and swelling of the narrative tide, Dibakar seems to derive a huge amount of unprecedented narrative power. The film moves across a luscious labyrinth of sensuous experiences. Kolkata’s grime and sweat is captured in crumbling guest houses and rickety warehouses where crime is a desirable reality only because the other option is ennui.
The narrative creates a feverish aura of frisson and power-play in the way the characters appear to respond to the socio-political and economic reality of Kolkata in the 1940s. It would be an insult to the film to say the period is created with unhampered pitch-perfection. Because not for even one shot do we feel the hand of the art director in shaping the Kolkata of the era gone-by.
Dibakar’s old Calcutta of trams and self-important bustle emerges not from cinematic pulls and pressures but from its own volition to create a world where the characters do not seem to pose in the clothes and mannerisms of the time. They just seem to be there from long before the Dibakar Banerjee school of filmmaking came into being.
Providentially, Sushant Singh Rajput seems to intuitively comprehend what the director and his brilliantly articulate cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis have set out to do. Sushant doesn’t simply get into the detective’s skin. He inhabits every nook and corner of the character. With due respect to the vivid portrayal of Byomkesh by Rajit Kapoor in the Doordarshan serial of the 1980s, Sushant is now officially the face of Byomkesh. He owns the part as much as Kinglsey owns Gandhi.
Particularly riveting are Sushant’s scenes with the extraordinarily brilliant Neeraj Kabi. When they are together on screen we are looking at neither actor as they both take us to a distance far away from their spoken words. Swastika Bannerjee’s movie star impersonation is filled with coquettish grace. The performance comes dangerously close to a caricature but is miraculously taken into the zone of nostalgic seduction. And yes, Anand Tiwari, as Byomkesh’s sidekick, looks flustered and tired enough to convince us that the only thing the young in the country can do to avoid catastrophe is watch films while the country burns.
Speaking on his preparation to play the legendary detective, Sushant Singh Rajput had told this writer, “I think the role and the performance helped me to understand myself better. The most important thing is to recognize the dark areas within your character; for example, Byomkesh is a novice, and he’s just stepping into a new life, and he doesn’t understand the art of seduction. Byomkesh was my most honest portrayal ever. And I am talking about all the theatre, television and cinema that I’ve done. My director, Dibakar Banerjee, told me that the way Uttam Kumar played Byomkesh in Satyajit Ray’s Chidiyakhana is the way my character would be later in his life. But he was very clear that I didn’t have to be like Uttam Kumar in this film. Dibakar briefed me on Byomkesh’s past, present, and future. Then he began to tell about the things that my Byomkesh would not be doing. I actually ended up playing Byomkesh exactly the way Dibakar wanted me to, though all along, I kept thinking I was playing him the way I wanted him to. Dibakar sketched out a look for me. Then he told me to watch films of the 1940s and 50s to understand the aspirations. I saw loads of films from those two decades. For four months, I stayed at home and, watched films and got into character. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t end up trying to run, walk, or slouch like a man from that era when I started shooting. I ate like Byomkesh. I ate so much Baighan and Aloo bhaja. For a month, I was in Kolkata for recce before shooting. We went to random families for meals and conversations. Every day, I visited two families in Kolkata for food and talk. They’ve very strong opinions on food, literature, culture and music. At the same time I also got to know about the protocol at the dining table in a Bengali household. You can’t go straight to the mutton. You have to first make your from the parwal to the aloo bhaja. I got to know about my troubled digestive system every morning. But luckily, the food was part of the preparation. Once we started shooting, I didn’t have to be a food slob. But I really enjoyed the food orgy specially the cham-cham, rashogolla and mishti dohi.”
Adding, “It would be a welcome change to just slip into a role and then be done with it in two months. But I don’t think I can do that kind of a film. Not after the experience that I’ve gone through. I don’t think I’ll be able to do a film where I fully understand everything in the first reading. It has to do with the reason why we make films. If a director like Dibakar had all the answers he wouldn’t make films. Filmmaking for him and acting for me has to be a journey of exploration. If I’ve all the answers from the start, there is no point in going into a film. Earlier, I could afford to be selfish. I did films for my own creative satisfaction. But now I admit there is a sense of responsibility. I’ve to think about audiences’ expectations. All the characters that I’ve played so far in Kai Po Che, Shuddh Desi Romance, and now Byomkesh…I’ve looked at them as individuals. When I was playing Byomkesh I was told I was looking under-confident. But that is the journey of the character, and I’ve to go along with it. When Rajit Kapoor played Byomkesh in the Doordarshan serial, he played him as a seasoned sleuth. He was aware of all his moves as a detective. I played a novice, a virgin-detective. I couldn’t have been as confident as Rajit. Mujhe lagta hai thodi insecurity thodi vulnerability are essential. You must recognize the character’s weaknesses and strengths.”
