Review : Dibakar Banerjee's "Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!" is not a flawed film, but a flawed whodunit.

When watching a whodunit at the cinema, there's always one character in the audience who hisses their predictions rather vehemently. I suppose such people cannot stand the thought of a mere film getting the better of them. And as far as I am concerned, I find this talent commendable only when they accurately guess the line dialogue about to follow a minor plot development.

There was a young bloke sitting in my vicinity who possessed this aptitude. Or maybe, he was simply voicing out loud what every single one of us in the audience were mulling over in our heads. It was just so predictable.

I admit, I'm a huge fan of Banerjee's cinema, but there is something a little off in his new film, but it is something ever so slight, I can't put my finger on it. One of the country's most promising talents in the film sphere, Banerjee has delivered four consecutive great films of which each one merits an earnest tribute. But here, he fumbles a bit. And it's such a shame because Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! frequently hits the right spots, but still remains an oddly unsatisfying mystery.

And a substantial portion of the blame should be plonked down on the largely predictable unwinding of the story. The other portion of the blame ought to be directed toward Alfred Hitchcock, who ruined whodunits for us for all eternity.

It's twisty, pulpy, moody and morbid enough to spawn a cracker of a mystery, but each revelation carries a distinctively--and frustratingly--familiar look. That is why I also abhor whodunits to an extent: we can easily evade being made fools of by them as a result of relishing many.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, even if it makes a critical mistake, is a wondrous film. Right from the reassuring opening sequence which meets the brief for an opening sequence only too well, through the opening credits that erect the world we are about to set foot in and lap up till the talky and prolonged denouement, it gets very little wrong. Not a single scene is wasted on tiresome frills or slack thrills. Like a surgeon sewing up a sprawling enigma, Banerjee toys with lights and shadows, characters and glorious details to paint a colorful, crowded and engrossing mystery in Calcutta of the '40s.

It's a hazy and seductive world of carnage and discreet secrets of muddy politics and drug peddlers. To set a whodunit right at the nub of it is the stuff dreams are made of, and that is exactly what Banerjee does. He constructs his world so carefully and authentically (courtesy Vandana Kataria's tasteful and ornate art design that gives the film its bragging rights), spraying it with such ambition and menace that it is futile to resist. Nikos Andritsakis captures the pastel city in all its nourish glory, feeding our imaginations with doleful visuals that signify the murkiness of the events about to unfold.

Till the intermission, the film hoards enough intrigue to pledge an exceptional second half, but it never arrives. The story takes a confounding turn post the interlude, with a sub-plot involving a conspiracy slowly coming into the picture. It's aggravating to be a part of this, for there is no edginess to excite us. And how can a mystery film function without vim and vigor? Banerjee delivers a surprisingly mellow detective film, and it cannot be surmised if this was intentional or not. Spare for the last few minutes of high theatrically and sprays of gore that tarnished my experience a tad, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is mostly an underplayed venture made with great finesse. And great music.

But there is something so charming about it all that I could digest it with its occasional blemishes. My favorite moment in the film involved a bearer who is asked to make tea after a short battle, and he crosses the foyer littered with corpses while the survivors chat casually. It's a moment of sudden dark humor, an ingenious bit of detail that provides ephemeral relief and reaffirms why Banerjee is the Hindi film industry's God Of Details.

The performances are excellent, save for Swastika Mukherjee's rendition of a femme fatale that is as bland as cardboard. Neeraj Kabi, the newfound wonder whom we last saw in Ship Of Theseus, is flat-out fantastic, altering between gentle and lunatic like a seasoned veteran. Anand Tiwari, always a valuable secondary actor, keeps him company with a restrained performance that is tough to ignore.

I had always envisaged Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi to be a worldly character, but Banerjee's version of him is a brusque bugger who happens to be endowed with an acute sense of judgement. His shamus is someone who walks around with a certain amount of swagger but has a childlike charm to boot. The oddity works. This sleuth is here to stay.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is a divisive film. It's not a flawed picture per se, but it is a flawed whodunit.

Reminiscence : Why Dibakar Banerjee's "Shanghai" is so much more than just a good film.

It is uncanny how Dibakar Banerjee's characters can stay with you.

You are introduced to a seemingly harmless dope as he whistles while cradling a hockey stick and calmly discusses violence like it is Sunday brunch. As the gale of a dusty riot animates on the screen, Banerjee, with remarkable precision, builds himself an India within an India in a wink. It is a hellhole that you haven't seen but have heard about, have ignored, which exists somewhere in the badlands of the country you don't want to hear about.

Banerjee is the man. The auteur's fourth film is far from his best work and yet, the man has a voice worth hearing. Shanghai spooks and schools, and it is in this astute, irascible adaptation of Vassilis Vassilikos' Z that Banerjee bares his most commercial film. It is a cautionary tale or a film pretending to be one, but it works so beautifully on both levels that you don't care. It is a film so shameless, so rasping, that it begs to be watched. It needs to be watched.

You hang on. It takes its own sweet time to flog. 

I have always tagged Banerjee - and quite obdurately, I might add - as the the finest working filmmaker in the Hindi film industry. He has painted portraits of the Indian middle class, shot a film on video camera in its entirety and gave us a political drama raring to point fingers. It is his recherche ability of accurately assessing people and situations and turning it into his advantage that makes him a budding talent. Because in his films, the characters aren't caricatures. We are not watching people whom we can't relate to, whom we don't know. These people are us, and this precise element makes Shanghai a spook story.

In the simplest words, it is a film about a country trying to be taken seriously. Loyally following the words of Vassilikos' novel, Banerjee aptly constructs and dissects the ideologies that have been plaguing India for months. 

It is not a film that inculpates, not directly, at least. It is not a film that seeks to change the situation the country has got itself embroiled in. It only enthusiastically wants to paint a splintered picture of a shriveling economy and steps back to let you be the judge. That's a different thing. It is not an anarchistic film, though bleak, though angry, though indignant, it is not.

Anyone who has read the novel or seen Costa Gavras' brilliant 1969 adaptation of the same knows how everything is going to pan out in the end. For me, there wasn't any concluding revelation waiting, you know, I just knew what the film was leading to. Shanghai, for me, was not about the suspense as it was for a majority of those ninnies who hadn't been an audience to one of the most relevant political films of the last century. And yet, even with the suspense killed, I gasped at the right places. Because Banerjee, ever so coolly, showed me how small an entity I am in a democratic country that secretly aspires to be a powerhouse on the global platform.

Of course, having lived in the birth country of a film industry obsessed with minting money, we're not accustomed to nurturing films that give us food for thought. And if that is why some of you have lightly dismissed Shanghai as simply being a good film, I ask of you to watch it again, think deeper, ponder. 

It may not be a film that entertains, but is a film that illuminates. In any film industry, that is a rara avis.