Sunday 3 October 2010

Byomkesh Bakshi [ 2010]


Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s super-sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi happens to be one of the greatest and loved literary characters in Bengal. Yet, singer-songwriter-director-actor Anjan Dutt’s Byomkesh Bakshi, based on brilliant novel Adim Ripu (Primal Instinct), is quite surprisingly only the second Byomkesh Bakshi film since Satyajit Ray’s Chiriakhana (The Zoo), and the third attempt at his exploits counting Basu Bhattacharya’s well-crafted TV series. The story is a labyrinthine murder mystery, and like all Byomkesh Bakshi novels, it is more about probing into the grotesque side of human society. The director took a lot of liberties with the minor details of the plot, and though most educated Bengalis would find that blasphemous, I felt the end result as reasonably good if not great. Abir Chatterjee as the detective was average at best, but Dutt-regular Saswata Mukherjee as his friend and loyal sidekick, and the story’s narrator, stole the show with his wry cynicism. But the best part belonged to Rudranil Ghosh as a lovelorn, mild-mannered guy who, [spoiler alert] as it turns out, is the story’s antagonist. I of course knew the story beforehand, but I nonetheless found the transformation well captured, along with the brooding mood and the pacing of the story.








Director: Anjan Dutt
Genre: Mystery-Drama/Detective Movie
Language: Bengali
Country: India

6 comments:

King Viswa said...

Oh My God,

My Bengali skills are long forgotten and am dead interested to watch this movie.

Is there any DVD With English/Hindhi Sub titles? When this film got released?

Shubhajit said...

I'm not sure whether its DVD has been released or not, cos I'm not at Calcutta right now. The movie had its theatrical release around a month or so back.

Sam Juliano said...

Well, Shubhajit you do make this film sound most interesting. As a theatrical rellease I quite understand it has only appeared in theatres so far. Great to see that your work continues to be excellent.

On another front, don't ask me how or why but I accidentally left you and three other bloggers off the MMD in my haste to put every together last night. The week before I forgot Joel Bocko. I am losing it! In any case the situation has just been rectified my friend!

Shubhajit said...

Thanks Sam for being so generous as always. And as for the omission, that's absolutely alright. That was a minor thing to say the least, and needn't have made any clarifications whatsoever my friend :)

Canada Drugs said...

I will wait for this movie and after i read this post i am very exited to watch.

Shubhajit said...

Yeah, this is a decent movie to say the least. If you get a chance, do watch it.