Rituparno Ghosh's last film Satyanweshi is a mixed bag

By Premankur Biswas Within the first few frames of Rituparno Ghosh’s last directorial offering, Satyanweshi, the lead character, Byomkesh Bakshi, likens a detective story to a hunting expedition. The eye for detail, the logical analysis of facts and the serendipitous connection between time and action characterises the success of both, he says. But what if the hunter or the writer is not there to make the final killing and tie the strings at the end? Does it spell doom for the whole enterprise? The answer to this lies somewhere in the middle in case of Satywaneshi, the shooting of which was completed by the director before his untimely demise but whose post production was handled by his core team of Arghyakamal Mitra (editor), Debjyoti Mishra (music director), Debabrata Dutta (associate director) and Avik Mukhopadhyay (cinematographer). While Rituparno Ghosh’s intrinsic ability to create mood out of few basic props are in evidence here (albeit in patches), there are times when you feel that certain crucial strands of the film were lost during the unfortunate change of hands. The best way to describe Satywaneshi is to call it a mellow psychological thriller. It’s filmed mostly indoors, soaked in a sense of induced melancholia and lit by flickering candles and soft afternoon light. It takes the much-loved bhadralok Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi (Sujoy Ghosh) and his writer friend Ajit (Anindya Chattopadhyay) to a palace in North Bengal. Here, a distraught king Himangshu (Indraneil Dasgupta) is desperate to convince his distrusting wife, Alaka (Arpita Chatterjee) that he has no hand in the disappearance of her friend and confidant, the palace librarian (Anirban Ghosh). The presence of a young widow (Anandi Ghose) and her Brahmin father (Sibaji Bandyopadhyay), both asylum seekers in the palace, makes things murkier. [caption id=“attachment_1089909” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Much of the first half unfolds like a claustrophobic chamber drama. There is very little camera movement, characters are stationed in richly upholstered sofa and they speak in a stilted fashion. In contrast, the inquisitors, Ajit and Byomkesh, are almost effervescent. Alaka moves from glazy-eyed indifference to heavy-lidded desperation through a series of well-written conversations with Ajit. The gradual crumbling of the Alaka-Himangshu marriage — a leit motif in Ghosh’s films — is coaxed out with a mix of empathy and clinical indifference by both Ajit and Bymokesh. It makes for really good cinema. Interestingly, Ghosh makes a point of establishing Ajit as an intellectual equal and not just a passive crony to Byomkesh in his interpretation. The second half is more outdoorsy and the mood lightens. Things stumble out of the closet in a picnic sequence where all the lead characters are involved in a game, an obvious tribute to Ray’s famous memory game sequence in Aranyer Din Ratri. But if these things work for the film, there are many loopholes that pull it down to level of being just a good film from the distinction of being a truly layered psychological exploration. Any fan of Ghosh’s film will notice the distinct change in the pacing of the film. Some transition shots seem jumpy and unrelated. Soon you realize important strands of the story are being repeatedly raised and abandoned for no apparent reason. For instance, Byomkesh makes it a point to ask Himngshu about the will twice, but this seems to be to no end. The performances too suffer from a sense of inconsistency. Arpita Chatterjee manages to bring to fore Alaka’s pain and desperation, but stumbles when she is supposed to be a carefree young woman. One might wonder at the logic behind casting a distinctly urbane and metrosexual Sujoy Ghosh (Kahini fame) as a Bengali bhodrolok from the 1930s, but it does make some sense. Evidently, Ghosh saw Byomkesh as a self-aware, urbane man of the time. Sujoy looks suitably smug throughout the film, but falters in some sequences. The same goes for the very competent group of non-actors that Ghosh had put together for this film. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, a much loved academic from Kolkata, is such a strong persona that his very presence lights up the frame, but he is often distinctly uncomfortable when he has to emote. Had Ghosh been able to finish the film_, Satyanweshi_ may have been very different. His last attempt at a thriller was the deliciously-layered Shubho Mahurat. In Satyanweshi, all we have are the shards, big and small, of Ghosh the master craftsman and that’s all that we will get to see of him anymore. Premankur Biswas is a freelance journalist and writer. You can reach him at premankur.biswas@gmail.com