Nirbaak review: This Bengali love story featuring Anjan Dutt, Sushmita Sen and a dog is burdened by ambition

by Titu Biswas At times, films arrive in body bags, mangled by the weight of their own lofty ambitions. At times, they die a premature death, poisoned by a poorly-designed trailer. National Award filmmaker Srijith Mukherji’s latest, Nirbaak, is a mixture of both. Nirbaak’s unfortunate trailer, which showed Bengal’s much-loved pop-icon of the 1990s, Anjan Dutt, admiring his ageing body in front of the mirror, repelled the weak-hearted. The film itself is an exercise in stylistic posturing that seems to be inspired by the exquisite, snail-paced cinematic perambulation of Tsai Ming Liang and Kim Ki Duk. It features people living on the fringes of urban society, a minimalist directing style and a whole lot of sexual innuendos. [caption id=“attachment_2223886” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Nirbaak movie still. Image from Facebook.[/caption] However, Nirbaak isn’t as pretentious as it sounds. As incoherent dream states go, you could do a lot worse—and at this point, that’s what amounts to high praise. Malcom (Anjan Dutt) is a jazz musician of some kind who is consumed with self-love and alienated from the world around him. Mukherji feels that fact needs to be lathered on our face by showing Dutt taking, long, luxurious dips in a soapy bath tub, followed by a longer shower, and again another bath, and again another shower… till he hits his head on the edge of the bathtub and dies. Sadly, no. But he does manage to squeeze in a shopping trip and a quick visit to the park in between these ablutions, but these are only preambles to the bath. There is something intrinsically repulsive about the Dutt story and I have a feeling that it’s not altogether unintentional. If that’s the case, then Mukherji succeeds in his endeavour, at least in this segment of the film. The other three stories are about different kinds of love, jealousy and alienation. The major players in these stories are a not-so-young, urban couple (Jisshu Sengupta and Sushmita Sen), a tree in a park in love with a girl, a dog in love with a man, and a sociopath in love with a dead body. And no, they don’t add up to great cinema, though they should have. Each segment of Nirbaak seems a little too self-conscious, a little to contrived, as if Mukherji looked at his assistants and said let’s-do-this-thing. Take the bizarre love-making sequence between the tree and the girl (Sen). Sen is seated on a bench under the tree, fiddling with her phone. We watch her voyeuristically through the sun-dappled leaves, her dupatta is blown away and she falls magically into a slumber. The leaves sway furiously and some juice oozes out from the stump of the tree. Sen snaps out of her slumber, collects her dupatta furtively and storms out of the scene. In case we still didn’t get the underlined meaning of the scene, Mukherji chooses to add another visual metaphor. One which would make even David Dhawan happy: a ripe fruit splashes on the ground as Sen walks away. So far, so gooey. There’s a peppering of interesting ideas to be sure, but Mukherji doesn’t seem to be bothered with committing to them, he prefers to blast away with image after overwhelming image, until the narrative is a montage of bizarre images. The story involving Ritwik Chakraborty and Sen’s dead body becomes a distracting byway, whereas the dog story—a much more concise scenario, with a stronger character vision—could have made for a full-fledged film. It’s a shame Mukherji burdens this film with so many ambitions and chooses not to fully explore the dramatic possibilities of that particular segment. The result is a film that is an approximation of its self-involved protagonist, Malcolm. A film in which coherency matters less than the accumulation of images.