Detective Byomkesh Bakshy Trailer: Sushant takes on Chinese villains in Dibakar's dark thriller

He might be a dhoti-and-socks wearing hero with a dowdy moustache and neatly side-parted hair, but it’s evident from the trailer of Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshy that this film is about anything but a timid, Bengali bhadralok. Set in a fictional 1940s’ Calcutta, Banerjee has given Bengal’s firmly middle-class detective Byomkesh Bakshi a very noir makeover. A walnut brown Sushant Singh Rajput stars as the detective on his first case — that of a missing person — and of course, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. According to the trailer, it’s about “A War… A Mystery… A Detective…” and we should “expect the unexpected”. Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG--GOpi_0g Joining Rajput in the cast are Tollywood’s favourite light-eyed diva, Swastika Mukherjee, and theatre actor, Anand Tiwari. Tiwari is the one who approaches Rajput’s Bakshi with a case: his father has disappeared. The police say the man is missing but Bakshi is convinced he’s been murdered and somehow, wrapped up in all this as a set of deadly, sword-wielding Chinese villains, the Green Gang of Shanghai. There are murders, dead bodies and all sorts of intrigue crowding up on Byomkesh as he doggedly pursues villains and scantily-clad women. As if all this wasn’t enough, there are soldiers and the sirens of war winding through the streets of Calcutta as Japan threatens to bomb the city. The trailer’s pounding heavy metal soundtrack should seem wildly out of place alongside the vintage cityscape, but instead a delicious, ominous edginess to this story. [caption id=“attachment_2057915” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “] Image courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Those familiar with the literary Byomkesh will probably stare with goggle-eyed shock at all the spilt blood and bare feminine skin on display, not to mention the sight of Byomkesh getting up close and personal with sultry vamps. Evidently, Banerjee has taken a lot of liberties from the original Saradindu Bandopadhyay story, “Satyanweshi”. In recent appearances, Banerjee has said that he was inspired more by the ambience described in pulpy B-grade detective novels rather than the polite, middle-class Calcutta in Bandopadhyay’s writing. There were hints of this in the teaser that was released last year and now the trailer shows that this is indeed more of Byomkesh by way of Sin City, despite the hand-pulled rickshaws and rattling trams in the film. Can Rajput and Banerjee turn a dhoti-clad, genji-wearing hero into a cool private eye who takes on sword-bearing, throat-slitting Chinese villains? We’ll have to wait till April to find out. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy releases on April 3, 2015.