Drishyantar movie review: Rana Banerjee's foolish whodunit bites off more than it can chew

The title of Rana Banerjee’s new Bengali film Drishyantar refers to the gap between two scenes in a play, and trust me when I tell you – the literal meaning of the word has so little to do with anything that happens during the course of this ridiculous, illogical and forcefully concocted sham of a plot, that by the end of it, you will realise that they could have named the film anything under the sun. The very notion that the makers claim their stake at having made a ‘cerebral’ film is so outright foolish that it is their false sense of pride that will come across as an object of academic study, more than anything else. Want to know how NOT to make a film? Watch Drishyantar. [caption id=“attachment_5092931” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Drishyantar. Twitter[/caption] Drishyantar is not entirely a thriller, nor a journey of self-discovery, not even a murder mystery. It is shocking, then, to note that it tries to be all of these, and more. As a result, it ends up being nothing, not even a good attempt. The film begins with a painfully long-drawn treatise of the many differences between the two disparate worlds of performing arts – cinema and theatre. Much of the discourse has been done to death in dozens of other films. But what hurts the most is that this entire segment plays absolutely no role in the development of the story – none, zilch, nada. If you would have happened to walk into the film 20 minutes late, for all practical purposes, you would miss nothing. A theatre director, who is popular in a suburban town of Bengal, has suddenly decided that he wants to cast a popular film heroine as the lead in his new play. Very well – you see the glimpse of a plot there, and you trust the sanity of the makers and place your faith in the film, watching it patiently. As it turns out, the actress agrees, and an entire subplot about the director having to sell his land to finance the film is totally dispensable – as is the fact that the man he sells it to has extracted a promise from him to cast his niece or daughter or someone in the new play – and the reason I cannot remember is because – hold your breath – the girl does not appear again in the entire movie! This is writing at its worst. Anyway, the rehearsals begin, and there is a scuffle at a party, and a husband that stays away from his actress wife, and a woman of questionable repute who is the neighbour of this actress, and she may or may not have had an affair with a psychiatrist, and another actress who holds a grudge against the heroine because she replaced her – basically, it is mess. The makers of this horrendous film have tried to inject everything into the plot, simply because they wanted to create red herrings, which, by themselves are so laughable that having them in the narrative causes irreparable harm to the film. Finally, there is a murder, and the heroine half-sees-half-doesn’t the murderer because she fell off a bike and half-lost-half-did-not her vision. She keeps having nightmares about the murderer whose face she cannot seem to make out, until one day, she conveniently remembers who she had seen, and it all becomes to clear to her. THAT is the denouement! I have seen a lot of lazy writing in my lifetime, but this is a whole new level of lazy. The performances themselves mean nothing – although there are some, especially the one by Debshankar Haldar, that at least shows signs of sincerity and genuine attempt. But with so little to work with, his role is reduced to a caricature in not one but several scenes. Vicky Deb is strictly one note – and he delivers all his lines with the same expression. Srabanti Chatterjee does precious little other than to flash that pretty smile of hers from time to time, which is why, during the scenes of duress, she is so unconvincing. Indrani Halder is wasted (both verb and adjective) and she sleepwalks through her role looking disinterested in the entire project. Some of the scenes in which she is trying to ‘solve’ the crime by doing ‘logical thinking and deduction’ are, for lack of a better word, downright foolish. I wonder how she even agreed to speak her lines. Drishyantar tries hard – too hard in fact – to be a whodunit. It ends up being a whydunit, as I sat in the dark, with a grimace on my face, wondering why, why, why did director Rana Banerjee do this to us?