First Take | Whodunits, Byomkesh Hotyamancha & Abir Chatterjee’s sterling sleuthing

There was a time when our celluloid heroes wore dhotis with pride and no prejudice. From Dilip Kumar in Devdas to Shah Rukh Khan in _Devdas_ , and—best of all— Rajesh Khanna in Amar Prem, dhoti-dancing seems to have gone out of vogue after Aamir Khan in Radha Kaise na jale in _Lagaan_ . Even in Bengali cinema where Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee wore the dhoti as though born to do so, the value and appeal of the apparel has withered over the years. It is heartening to see the very talented Abir Chatterjee carry off the dhoti with such casual elan in director Arindam Sil’s _Byomkesh Hotyamancha_ . This is Abir’s seventh foray into Byomkesh territory and he is the portrait of self-assured sleuthing: snoopy yet distant, suspicious of all but disdainful of none, Abir makes the best Byomkesh on screen, and I say this with utmost respect to Rajit Kapur who popularized Byomkesh in the series on Doordarshan, Uttam Kumar (who played Byomkesh in Satyajit Ray ’s _Chiriyakhana_ ) and Parambrata Chatterjee . Abir’s s first three Byomkesh films entitled Byomkesh Bakshi, Abar Byomkesh and Phire Elo Byomkesh were directed by Anjan Dutt. Those films wore their own aura of arrogant expertise. With director Arindam Sil this is Abir Chatterjee’s fourth Byomkesh film after Har Har Byomkesh, Byomkesh Pawrbo, Byomkesh Gowtri. This time the Byomkesh outing is based on an incomplete story of the Byomkesh creator Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and is set in the stagey world of Kolkata theatre in the 1970s when the biggest of celluloid stars from Suchitra Sen to Aparna Sen , ventured on stage. The setting is Hatibagan Kolkata’s Broadway, and the murder is carried out right there on stage with Byomkesh and his pregnant wife Satyabati ( Sohini Sarkar ) in the audience when a self-consumed nasty philandering actor Bishu Pal (Kinjal Nanda) who has to play dead on stage seems to carry method acting too far. The investigative procedural that follows rakes up Bishu Pal’s murky antecedents. Once we know how nasty Bishu has been to his entire stage colleagues it is clear that this man is better off dead. The narrative weaves its way through the murder victim’s nasty past and truncated present with a non-judgemental attitude: no one deserves to be killed, right? After seeing Byomkesh Hotyamancha I am not too sure. The film has an interesting array of actors playing actors. The underrated Paoli Dam brings an air of doom to her role of Sulochana, an actress who made an unforgivable mistake in her past that haunts her entire future. The unfaithful woman, the kalankini, is faithful leitmotif in the storytelling. This story’s one fatal flaw is the overcrowded canvas. So many characters on stage, all suspects. Even a cursory backstory for them seems a tall order. The film makes a relevant comment on the death of the theatre culture in Bengal when a young ambitious actress Somriya (Anusha Bishwanathan) is shown trying to induce an aura of oomph into her stage performance. Byomkesh Hotyamancha brings into play many levels of cultural erosion in Bengal: from the obsoleteness of the dhoti to the growing redundancy of theatre culture, a part of the blame must be shouldered by the commercial Bengali cinema which in recent years has taken to aping its Bollywood counterpart. Byomkesh Hotyamancha reverses the trend of tawdry apery. It is a quietly reverent homage to an era when literature, theatre and yes, the dhoti ruled the cultural topography of Kolkata, then Calcutta. Now, neither Kolkata nor Calcutta. Just lost. This seems like a good time to revisit Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshy in 2015 where Sushant Singh Rajput doesn’t simply get into the detective’s skin. He inhabits every nook and corner of the character. 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. Exquisite in form, compelling and at times deeply impenetrable in content Detective Byomkesh Bakshy 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. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy 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 Bannerjee and not Sharadindu Badhopadhyay 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 specially sounds emerge from the storytelling with a casual flair for making the obvious look subtle and the innocuous, 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.

From the seeming ebbing and swelling of the narrative tide, Dibakar seems to derive a huge amount of unprecedented narrative power from his source material. 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. Byomkesh and whodunits remind me of Meghna Gulzar ’s _Talvar_ , the ultimate whodunit about the real-life Arushi murder which to this day remains unsolved, at least in the public’s mind. Talvar, released in 2015, in hindsight, is just the kind of cinema that we all love to love, and praise. It generates an enormous empathy for the parents of that poor slain child Arushi Talwar, though, for reasons best known to the film’s team, the murder victim’s name and the identity of all the primary characters have been altered just enough so that we know. Also, there isn’t enough of the couple in the film. As the Talwars, Konkona Sensharma and Neeraj Kabi offer us a vivid insight into the parents’ trauma. But finally, we know very little of what they feel beyond the obvious grief. Talvar is a film that prides itself on research and detailing. And yet if you have a maidservant with plucked eyebrows and in a chicly cut blouse opening a film that purports to tell you the truth about the Arushi Talvar murder case, you are bound to sniff something suspicious in the air. This is a film is pointedly designed to pitch the innocence of the Talwars, who were accused of, for the want of a better word, referred to as “honour killing.” In graphic sometimes cruelly ironic detail the film wags its sensitive fingers at the law machinery that apparently botched up the case. Everyone connected with the case barring the outgoing CBI investigator Ashvin Kumar wanted to pin the blame on the parents. Just why there was so much anxiety in the official circles to make the parents seem culpable is none of the film’s concern. Answers are hard to find in the complex of web of lies, deceptions, conspiracies and vendettas that navigate Meghna Gulzar’s narrative. In the absence of a motive to pin a motive for the murder on the parents, Talvar seems to be mocking those who went out of their way to see Arushi’s parents in jail. (For those came in late, the Talwars are currently in jail for murdering their only daughter). The mocking laughter at the theory suggesting how and why the Talwars killed Arushi can almost be heard in the film’s background score. Meghna Gulzar holds herself back from laughing out loud at the law enforcers. But the way the initial investigation of the murder is shown to be carried out, you can see the plot mocking the cops in parodic pleasure. One of them is a pot-bellied pan-chewing cellphone-challenged lout straight out of a ‘c’ grade crime thriller.

The hero of the show is the CBI, disguised as ‘CDI’, office Ashvin Kumar, played with an aloof poise by the late Irrfan Khan , who while questioning the various dramatis personae in the case, likes to keep playing video games. It’s an interesting embellishment designed to create a contrast between the routine world that continues with its trashy preoccupations in the face of individual tragedy. (I am presuming it’s an embellishment because we’ve no way of telling the fact from fiction in this film and if the director and screenwriter Vishal Bhardwaj claim it’s all true then we have to take their word for it) Irrfan’s character holds the nebulous strands of Meghna Gulzar’s ambivalent investigative narration together. He is in fine form again, specially in the pre-finale where he crosses Talvars (swords) with his hostile colleagues in the CB…sorry DI. Soham Shah is excellent as Irrfan’s turn-coat associate. And Tabu with her clenched jaws shows up as his unhappy wife only so that Meghna can pay tribute her father’s film Ijaazat. The centrality of the murder investigation is challenged by Vishal Bharadwaj’s multi-optional script. He tells us that the parents could be guilty only if judged by the grotesque investigation conducted initially by the bumbling cops who declare it’s an open-and-shut case. The plot’s sympathies are clearly with the parents who are seen as victims of a media circus fuelled by rumours gossip and speculation. However, ambivalence is not a luxury but a necessity in a film examining a real-life case waiting for closure. To compare the film’s format with Akira Kurosawa’s Roshomon is a tad illogical. Here, the multiplicity of open endings is hardly balanced out into a reasonable gallery of options. The explanation that seems to appeal most to the screenplay is the one that left the law-enforcing agencies most unconvinced. To be honest, the tragedy is too enormous to be analyzed in black-and-white terms. This cinematic adaptation attempts to remain non-judgemental but ends up delivering sharp knocks on the collective knuckles of the law enforcers who put the Talwars in jail after they lost their only child. As far as unsolved whodunits go Talvar delivers a sharply-aimed blow at conventional readings of real-life crime. Sreekar Prasad’s razor-sharp editing brings the colliding perspectives on the murder into one solidly aligned range of vision. As Meghna Gulzar stares non-judgmentally at the wrecked lives of a well-to-do Delhi couple we get a glimpse into the terrifying emptiness at the centre of the human soul. It’s a place we seldom peer into. We have to thank Talvar for taking us there. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram