Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!

Set up in a gorgeously rendered 1940s-Calcutta atmosphere, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! promises to take us on a self- indulgent whodunnit thriller but the ! turns into ? sooner as the movie is overlong and lacks the usual Bollywood song romance and twist drama feel.

Director: Dibakar Banerjee

Cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Anand Tiwari, Neeraj Kabi, Swastika Mukherjee, Divya Menon, Meiyang Chang

Genre: Crime Action Noir Thriller

Runtime: 139 min

Rate: 6/10.

Directed by the much-lauded National film award-winner Dibakar Banerjee: Circa November 1942, the adventure begins where the story intertwines the episodes of opium smuggling & gangster scare, Japanese ruling and fight for freedom in war-torn Calcutta. Japanese and Chinese agents and smugglers were engaged in furtive & selfish activities to detach the city from British control to get traction in the Indian and Burmese markets.

Amidst the tireless and proxy war in the state, introducing our smart & desi hero Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput): who has got a shrewd & raw mind like that of Sherlock Holmes. He is socially-awkward youngster, but believes that he has great analytical mind which is just waiting for a venture to be unfolded to make him a star detective. Tada! He is blessed by the approach of Ajit Bandopadhyay (Anand Tiwari), who is searching for his missing father Bhuvan.

Before we look into what the movie has got for us, the notable highlights & applaud winning positives were: The attention to detail is obvious in almost every frame of the film of this pre-independence Calcutta set up. From the right clothes to correct signboards, every detail has been so meticulously imagined, planned & executed you actually feel that you are in the mystical culture melting frame. The diffused lights & the darkness in which the film has been shot give you the chills of questioning your existence in the war & scheming filled state. The entire cast has done justice to the noir crime action feel of the movie giving impetus to the way the story is meant to unravel.This film will take the enigma around the popular Bengali sleuth many notches higher! Sushant Singh commands as Bakshy! And particularly striking is femme fatale Anguri (Swastika Mukherjee) and the way her beauty has been harnessed with the use of glowing shafts of lights makes her opaque, exotic & bedazzling as a shining butter paper. The cinematography is completely & mind-blowingly intoxicating: the darkness always smolders; right amount of glow across characters’ faces; curlicues of smoke rise from cigarettes and much more.

Source:YRF

Coming back to the reel, when Byomkesh Bakshy’s sleuth mind gets searching, he lands up discovering that Bhuvan had not gone missing, but had been ruthlessly murdered. His journey is now flipped to rather find the killers of Bhuvan & bring in justice for son Ajit. As and when the case progresses, he keeps on meeting various characters, at one point he thinks he has solved the case only to find out he was being misguided by one of his own accomplice and restarts the case with further more ado.  More twists and turns keep spiraling in the film, which also includes merciless murders at regular intervals. In this tumultuous search, glamour is brought in with a very seductive Devi/ Anguri (Swastika Mukherjee) who obviously is on the sides of the gangsters(psst..poor Bakshy doesn’t know this…ahem! Well everything is fair rather blind in love and war) and tries her level best to seduce him to blur his focus on the important points of the case. Amidst all this, bloodshed and violence, Byomkesh Bakshy, suddenly, gets his hands on a crucially mysterious map. What is the mystery of the map, does Byomkesh Bakshy become successful in nabbing the culprit of Bhuvan, the reason behind his assassination and also the culprit behind the series of murders and the reason for their murders is what forms the rest of the film.

However, the pro-longed concept of showing pre-independence, violence and the darkness associated at times makes the attempt a lackluster one. The movie should have been truncated as it gets overtly stretched and looses the audience participation and becomes a whocares! from a whodunnit? Going to a theater for 2+hours and not having a song dance drama episode doesn’t go down well with masses and makes it likeable only among a selected group loving the ‘period’ genre films. This indeed outlines that Dibakar took a very courageous and ambitious project with a prepared outcome.

Verdict: This movie would have been an excellent literary piece and a smashing hit among avid novel readers. As a no-song, no-typical Bollywood drama, dark thriller it would get a thumbs up by you if you are a fan of ‘period crime fiction’ genre movie. Definitely worth a shot to appreciate the aesthetics of the movie.