Review: Zoya Akhtar's "Dil Dhadakne Do" is a brave attempt to revive a dead genre, but a feeble one.

Zoya Akhtar can be deservingly counted amongst the most exciting filmmakers working in the Hindi film industry today. She has a novel approach, always something interesting to say, beautiful to show, without ever banking on her cast entirely to make sure her audience leaves, content. Her contributions to her films are evident, even when she manages to cast prominent actors even in the smallest of roles, splurging on the minutest details. While her miraculous debut, Luck By Chance, was an affectionate, bravely grim and always insightful exploration of the functioning of the Hindi film industry, it was her second film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, that she made known the kind of cinema she believes in. It is classic escapist cinema; glistening and scenic locales, a barrage of good-looking people at every corner of the frame who wear fashionable clothes but are strangely alienated in their own lives. 

Dil Dhadakne Do is a contemporary rehash of the genre that Sooraj Barjatya made his decades ago, but it suffers from the same problems that Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did. It has a troop of affluent but mysteriously unlikable characters who say dull things, do dull things, have dull problems and grumble throughout the film in the hopes of solving them, but all of this against the backdrop of a lovely country. It doesn't help their cases much, I'm afraid, that these problems are boringly predictable, and neither does it help our case because our narrator here is a dog.

Dil Dhadakne Do kicks off with a voiceover explaining the milieu of each of our four protagonists, and setting up the plot that will go precisely haywire in the next 170 minutes. In the opening minutes, Akhtar cleverly stresses on the problems of each character without overdoing it, and we quickly have a clear picture of what's going on their minds. As the story progresses and finally boards a plush yacht, more and more characters join in, crowding the story as one would expect it to, but each character, each relationship is established rather skillfully. Romance -- furtive, open, expressive, subdued, developing, decaying -- is at the core of the story. People are either falling in love or out of it all over the place, and it gets on one's nerves at a point when it is hard to keep track who is chasing whom. But beside the multiple love angles here, there's also the familial problems that plague the family at the heart of all this. The family in question has a patriarch who is a millionaire but struggling to keep his company afloat, a self-made millionaire daughter who is -- I found this rather interesting -- among the world's ten best entrepreneurs as ranked by Forbes (that's a bit tall, innit?) but who is -- ouch! -- snubbed and overlooked by both her in-laws and parents, and a son who is the heir to the fortune but who wants to do nothing but ride planes. Of course, realism is not something to be found here.

As mentioned before, the story follows the same trajectory that Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did three years ago, only with more simplified characters. It is hard to invest into their troubles emotionally, because these are not characters whom we love or empathize with but the story develops assuming that we are already buying into their grief. That is a major blunder. 

Until intermission, Dil Dhadakne Do is predictable but reasonably diverting, and the set-up promises a potentially fun second-half. But post-intermission, the story crumbles like a sand castle in a tornado.

There is a limit to how far one can stretch their story till it goes topsy-turvy, and how whiny the characters can get in successive scenes. But this limit is challenged so brashly, it becomes doubly difficult to care about anything any longer. The outcome of each parallel thread can be seen from a mile away, yet we are made to watch as each character struggles to cope with the decaying relationships in their lives. What was foreseen as a potentially amusing set-up swiftly deteriorates into a cluttered mess. Oh, where did the subtlety disappear? It vanishes completely, and everything goes -- painfully -- downhill from there. But the saving grace comes in the form of an adeptly executed scene where empowerment of women is broached. It is a shining star in the phase of the film where homilies on marriage and children are delivered at every turn. We will gladly lap it up.

The performances are nothing to speak of, except Anil Kapoor, Shefali Shah and Ranveer Singh who give performances so earnest, it manages to salvage the film marginally. But what salvation can be achieved in a film that promised so much, yet achieved so little?

In films that tackle dysfunctional families, it is necessary to create quirky characters that are genuinely affable and earn our sympathies, characters whom we can envision as or hope to be real people. Dil Dhadakne Do lacks that. And with an ending that is utterly over-the-top but thankfully not prolonged, it only becomes harder to care for these chicly-dressed but hollow mortals. 

This is not a bad film. It has a few bits here and there that are amusing, and a clever voiceover narration that is often introspective. But a handsomely-mounted film cannot redeem certain shortcomings. And the shortcomings are too many to turn a blind eye to. Reviving a dead genre isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it needs to be done right to be effectual. This simply is not.

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Review: The charms of Shoojit Sircar's "Piku" are simply impossible to resist.

One aspect I always admire about Shoojit Sircar's films, may it be the impressive Vicky Donor, the compassionate Yahaan or the gripping Madras Cafe, is his empathetic approach towards his characters. Sircar isn't one who approves of his characters being cardboard cutouts that we have to buy as human beings while using his flair to propel the story. He imbues them with real feeling, allows us to witness them go from being personae to people we know, and have always known. It is this compassion that sets him apart from his peers.

I have always believed that a film tends to get immeasurably and mysteriously more enchanting when the director has great empathy for his characters.

Piku might just be Sircar's best yet, and though it evidently lacks a coherent story -- not that it needs it, really -- it finds a great deal of warmth in a dotard's gastric troubles.

If crowd-pleasers are the need of the hour, this sure is one to laud. Like an old-fashioned auteur, Sircar uses quaint locales of New Delhi that have a quiet dignity and populates it with his characters and the subtlest of details. The nuances are often so marvelous both in the art design and performances that one doesn't really need to take the effort to dig into this concoction; Sircar manages to fling us right in the middle of the morning troubles of a familiar Bengali family by skillfully manipulating a terse conversation. A waspish old hypochondriac and his daughter bicker over his diet and his imaginary constipation problems before she heads off to her office, but it is enough to brief us about the relationship they share. Juhi Chaturvedi, also the screenwriter of Vicky Donor, pens this brisk opener that probes gently but deeply into their lives, and never presents us with a shallow sequence as the story matures into something more dense. It is writing of the highest order. Each scene is utilized to flesh the characters out, bring out a detail we had not noticed about them and acquaint ourselves with them better.

Although Piku toys with the familiar here, it has the rare quality of being entirely unpredictable. Essentially a heartwarming father-daughter story, there's a gorgeous sequence early into the film where Bhashkor, the sullen old man, has too much to drink and begins frolicking in the middle of the night. His daughter, at first reproachful but then can't help but smile at the sight, regards him silently as a parent would regard their child from the door of the room, heads back to her own and twirls around for a bit. Volumes of sentiment is captured in a few seconds of subdued imagery, and it made me want to cheer loudly. Like the film itself, it's a celebration of the imprint of childhood inside each one of us, and the sudden feeling of realizing its existence.

And these magical bits keep dropping.

There's a likable madness about the old man, but the daughter panders to his every request even when she feels it's a waste of time. When the film transcends briefly into the road-movie territory, he begins singing and she joins in discreetly. To an outsider, it seems like a dysfunctional family trying to keep to itself, experimenting with the very definition of conventional, but to them it is a routine they have been maintaing for a long time. Sircar's and Chaturvedi's triumph here is that the audience is never made to feel as if they are scrutinizing an unorthodox, reclusive family. To make Piku a noteworthy attempt as an offbeat comedy-drama, the quirky potential of the story is never exploited. Instead, it is treated as one would treat a more conventional drama that involves an eccentric family.

Sircar only plays to his strengths here. He has the ability to keeps a carefree tone throughout, even when the characters discuss some rather weighty themes, and employs very little to no melodrama to make an impact. The scenes do not linger longer than it is necessary. This tautness gives Piku its zing that even a well-cut thriller rarely provides by burning through a bag of tricks. This is old school filmmaking.

The performances need to be exacting, carefully spontaneous and multilayered to make a film like this work, and the cast performs small marvels. This definitely is the most well-acted Hindi film of the year till now, but there is an actor who stands out among them all. Amitabh Bachchan, the veteran who is probably in the most diverse phase of his career currently -- and what a fine, fine career he has had! -- turns Bhashkor into one of the most winsome characters I have seen in Hindi films recently, and each moment of his screen time is one to cherish. He's gullible, acid-tongued, delightful, chatty, unapologetically proud of his heritage and overly protective of his daughter, much like any 70 year-old senile person, and Bachchan's earnest, flawless performance is one of his very best. He pulls off each variation fantastically. Bhashkor's silent acceptance of his daughter as the mother figure in his life is handled with real delicateness, and Sircar deserves pats on his back for that.

My only grouse -- and this is only nitpicking -- is that a film like this needs to be shorter, not as prolonged as Piku is. And it drags a wee bit towards the end with repeated but admittedly amusing conversations tackling the different ways a person can defecate, but their very presence does not serve any purpose.

Ultimately, Piku is nothing but a crowd-pleaser that hinges on nostalgia and pits enjoyable characters against each other to fulfill the void of entertainment. And in that respect, it is a smashing success.

As if the scene featuring an intoxicated Bhashkor dancing wasn't enough to soak up, there's a sublime sequence at the end that shows him cycling through the teeming, pastel streets of Kolkata. I would pay a fortune to be at the place where the idea for that sequence was conceived.

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Review: Damian Szifron's "Wild Tales" is a rollicking ride into lunacy.

After my initial viewing of Damian Szifron's Wild Tales two months ago, I was left -- scarily -- in a particularly malevolent mood. Having never taken a liking to anthology films, this was a charming surprise even for someone who prefers feature films to shorts. With six shorts, six perfectly dark, hilarious, impressively immoral and utterly deranged shorts, Szifron demonstrates his aptitude for handling atmosphere and suspense and tonal shifts. And with each viewing, Wild Tales becomes a deeper, more exhaustive examination of what happens when ordinary mortals are driven to the extremities of desperation. 

With the brand of black comedy that the very Irish McDonagh sibling duo, Martin and John Michael, have made their forte (with four films, namely In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, The Guard and Calvary, between them), Szifron churns out six immaculately balanced and wildly inventive satirical short films with a common theme of vengeance. Bravely cynical about the future of Argentina, it portrays upright people trying to break free of tyranny and oppression by taking to violence as a way to vent their frustrations. There is no escape; this is gorge of pessimism and we are made to take the plunge. There is the inescapability of the symbolic spurt of brutal violence, but it is almost poetic in its impact. And, in a mad way, it adds to the film's persistent comical undertone.

Much has been discussed about volatile opening short film that sets the mood of the film, that makes the rest of the shorts look slightly pale in comparison. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if it gains a cult status, and I wouldn't mind if it does either. It is so ambitious, so deliciously savage that it's hard not to be a little breathless after it ends. And dazzled. Reproducing its flavor in the subsequent shorts, Szifron imbues his film with great verve that never dampens. Till the scathing last shot, till the last person snaps, the film remains feisty with a subtly seditious edge. Truly, a piece of cinema as polished, as smart and as assured as this is as scarce as a comet. 

The only problem -- as is the problem with many anthology films -- with Wild Tales is, not all shorts work as well. "The Rats" and "The Proposal" might be brief endeavors that would be terrific as independent shorts, but here they do not blend in as well owing to the patent lack of diabolical twists. With the other films bursting with revelations by the dozen, these two follow a disappointingly predictable trajectory. But to Szifron's credit, none of the ventures can be classified as bad or even mediocre. But, alas, the picture overall looks a shade distorted. 

Wild Tales is one of my favorite films of last year, and a film that ousted Sion Sono's brilliant Why Don't You Play In Hell? as the most fun I had had at the movies in a long, long time. Relish it in whichever way you see fit, but the universality and the tragedy of its message cannot be eluded.

Perusal: The Characters of Chaitanya Tamhane's "Court."

A few days ago, I had the good fortune of watching Chaitanya Tamhane's intellectually rich and contemplative character study, Court, a film that was decidedly the finest I had seen all year. A whole week has passed since then and not a moment has flown past without me going back to it, for it is a film that caters to only those who are willing to dig deep into the details crammed into its mundane world. Tamhane weaved a wryly cynical inspection of the lives of those who are a part of the judicial system, transcending at this point other Indian courtroom-dramas that seldom bothered with such a thing, and while it also doubles as a critic of it, one can't help but wonder that there is more to Court than a detractor's view of the flimsy Indian judicial system.

For me, Court was foremost a story of alienation, and an observer of caste and gender differences.

Forsaking any hint of a plot with deliberate brashness, Tamhane moved to the outside of the courtroom and invaded his characters' personal lives. It is this move that caught my attention, because I wasn't used to it as an Indian cinegoer. In 1984, Saeed Akhtar Mirza delivered a sardonic rendition of the failings of the judicial system with the sublime Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho, wherein he astutely explored the psychological and emotional repercussions that legal proceedings have on those who are a part of it. And he also did it by invading his characters' personal spaces and painting their backstories using finer strokes. 

But what discriminates Tamhane's film from the classic is that the youngster is far more interested in people than personas. 

Tamhane's decision to draw a straight comparison between the lives of the public prosecutor and the defense lawyer is curiously clever and amplifies the mystical quality about them. It was an appraisal of caste, of gender and of the conduct of two people with two different approaches to their jobs in that environment. Every character is cloaked with a thickly psychological undercurrent, making it impossible not to invest in or explore it.

But as the concise and fitting title of the film suggests, it is the courtroom where we actually find out how their backgrounds mold them as lawyers. 

The character of Vinay Vora (played by the film's producer, Vivek Gomber) is a lawyer with a feeble sense of humor and a spirited conscience. He is a modern-day embodiment of Robin Hood, one who shops for exotically packed veggies and liquor in an air-conditioned supermarket, one who doesn't forget the pleasantries even while conversing with people who are not used to them, one who will willingly empty his pockets to bail his penniless client out but one who, at the end of the day, will visit a pub with a plush ambience to unwind. A quiet, self-assured and brooding character who is undeniably well-educated, well-read and brought up in an affluent household, it's evident from the way he conducts himself in the courtroom how his upbringing shaped him as a person. Adopting a practical and pedantic approach to the case, he accentuates his academic background by choosing to speak in English, switching to Hindi only while cross-examining, and quizzing the witnesses bluntly without beating around the bush. 

Gomber's finest moment--or maybe Tamhane's--was how he played him in the scenes featuring characters that were lower to his character in stature. He empathetically invites a friend of his client to lunch instead of asking him to wait when he is interrupted, drops the prosecutor's witness off in his car while calmly instructing her how to wear a seatbelt and promising to find a job for her, but is curt with his parents. 

Does empathy or sympathy drive his actions? Is the character a patronizer of sorts? 

As the public prosecutor and adversary, Nutan (played by Geetanjali Kulkarni) comes across as someone who has swallowed whole books on law. Mechanically quoting passages from numerous books, she is a by-product of everything the character of Vinay Vora isn't. Discarding basic logic for the sake of theory, making seemingly overblown statements in an attempt to implicate the accused on some charges and deprived of any zeal whatsoever while fighting the case, Nutan is a character that is the most multidimensional, most enigmatic of the lot. Unlike her rival, she buys her vegetables from the station (in Mumbai, the phrase "from the station" implies frugality) and dines silently in a modest restaurant, speaking only to remind her children to chew their food properly. Her face remains impassive even when she adds a forced "I strongly object" and it doesn't see much of a change when her opponent knocks a final nail in the coffin. From making small talk about olive oil and saris to expressing her exasperation at the futility of dragging the court cases on for years, it's a brilliantly realized and nuanced performance. 

But two things about the character caught my attention. Interestingly, Nutan isn't someone who might reject a chance of gaining leverage by crucially choosing to speak in a dialect that she has in common with the judge, and one that she knows fully well that the defense lawyer doesn't quite understand. But does she choose to conduct the proceedings in a language that all three of them are comfortable with? No. There is a thin trace of cunningness in her, of smugness, one that comes to the surface near the end when she brings up fresh and rather absurd charges against the accused and almost believes them, offering no explanation for it whatsoever. Even while she tediously builds a case against the accused--whose background, I surmise, is closer to hers than it is to the defense lawyer's, a stinging bit of irony--her queries seem practiced, distant and dispassionate. 

What I'm all agog to know is, is her decision to choose to conduct the proceedings in Marathi despite the defense lawyer's repeated protests and rarely look him in the eye a way to condescend to him? Isn't her decision to watch a Marathi propaganda play that is clearly against a minority similar in essence to the case of the person's she is trying to implicate?

Probably the character who is more abstruse than Nutan is of Judge Sadavarte (played by Pradeep Joshi), whose eyes convey years of wisdom, shrewdly weighing his words before uttering them unlike the caricatures posing as magistrates in other Indian courtroom-dramas who gabble deadpan lines of dialogue. The least sketched among the lot, Sadavarte is evidently a man of principles; he chides a woman who turns up in a sleeveless top for violating the code of conduct in the court and refuses to listen to her case. Regressive, perhaps, and superstitious to boot, it's in the final minutes of the film that show him taking a brief family vacation where this mysteriously distant character materializes into a multilayered one. While his family takes dips into the pool fully clothed, Sadavarte stretches out on a sofa, preaching superstition as a cure for a child's problems. While having dinner, it's interesting to note that the men and women sit on different tables, and he, once again, likes to be the one talking. 

It's a nice touch of detail to see how his job rubs off of him even in his social gatherings. Not used to being inferior to anyone, he talks over his kinsfolk, an air of condescendence wrapped around him. There's also a peculiar lack of empathy when he cuffs a kid who plays a prank on him, thus fulfilling my initial impression of him as a hardened man of scant sentiment. 

And the character at the core of this fascinating mess is Narayan Kamble (played by real-life social activist, Vira Sathidar), an incendiary and folk singer who just won't stop his diatribes against the society that has failed him. Fiery and composed, his stimulating and spiteful performances land him in jail for abetting the suicide of a manhole worker. In a quietly powerful, astonishing sequence, he refuses to be anything but forthcoming even when his future is possibly jeopardized. Answering each question he is asked as he is cross-examined with brutal candor, it earns him an amused chuckle from the only other man of principles we know: the judge himself. A clone of the big man, perhaps?

Although a victim of the country's judicial system and corruption within it, Tamhane accentuates the tragedy of his story when Kamble is arrested the second time on botched-up charges of terrorism as he is publishing a rather irreverently-titled book "A History of Humiliation." It symbolizes how even the freest of individuals cannot save themselves from the tentacles of a shoddy system. 

The beauty of this film is, we know exactly where these characters lie in the scheme of things even when the film does not enlighten us. It provides with startling clarity a picture of how these mortals are lonely in their crowded milieus, how the court case is their only way to reclaim some credibility, how their credos clash in search for truth and how it's just an ego game when the truth becomes too absurd to handle. We see a bunch of characters fighting for something that cannot lead to any personal rewards, but they fight on nevertheless. And for what? It's just their way of life. Is sidelining the truth is their way of life? And everything boils down to how, at the end of the day, they simply go with the flow. 

Court is proudly pessimistic about the future of this country, and all the more intriguing because of it. 

In a metaphorical shot near the end, the courtroom slowly and silently empties, like a battlefield after a particularly bloody battle. But as Tamhane portrays it, it's a battle of little consequence.

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Review: Chaitanya Tamhane's "Court" is the best film of the year, thus far.

The Indian courtroom has seen a great amount of needless dramatics in film over the years. It has been turned into a shrine for theatricality time and time again by unworldly filmmakers who have not quite grasped its significance or perhaps its scope. B.R. Chopra's landmark courtroom-drama Kanoon paved the way for Indian auteurs to explore this genre in 1960, but somewhere along the way, the symbolic courtroom has been reduced to a place where justice and forced patriotism come after an enthusiastic display of histrionics.

Informed of the gross misinterpretation, young Chaitanya Tamhane takes it upon himself to set the record straight and debuts with the fantastically poised Court, a downright spellbinder that delivers what is an intricate and composed study of the country's shaky judicial system. What begins as an unassuming trip into the predicament of an aging folk singer who is picked up on charges of abetting the suicide of a manhole worker swiftly and with careful deliberation deviates from its central thread to study the context of a lower court.

The first and last shots of the film piqued my curiosity. It opens with a cluster of children packed densely in a small room reciting poetry and ends with the protracted image of an old man dozing in a large, empty garden. The two shots mystifyingly contrast with each other; in the first, an old man sits among the kids, evidently fond of them but in the last, another old man is clearly shown to be disapproving of them. What does it imply? Were these bits of details mere coincidences? There is a world of meaning imbuing these frames but Tamhane does not shed any light on it. That's probably how I would sum Court up: there is a cosmos of thought behind each frame, each little detail, but it is intentionally left inscrutable, unexplained. Tamhane provides a window for thought, for questioning everything that we see and everything that he insinuates, and Court can only be enjoyed, for lack of a better word, if we truly indulge in it. And if we possess the patience to sit through it. 

As the film progresses, we figure that there's something more to it than just a story of a wrongly accused man. And this is particularly aggravating, for we find out what is on Tamhane's mind only at the end of the film. Like a seasoned auteur, he skillfully calibrates how much we know about the characters, diligently and patiently sculpting them throughout the film's runtime. We follow them around as they go about in their personal lives and how they transform from hardened lawyers and judges to commonplace folk who take the local transport to go home, who have silent dinners that are punctuated by the sounds of television and doorbells. Tamhane juxtaposes their private and professional lives and urges us to look beyond their versions in the courtroom. And at the end, we have a multidimensional portrait of each one of them, so true to life that one might fault them for being real individuals. And these lives are so desperately lifeless, the characters being alienated victims of their own selves, that it is strangely affecting.

Court is, by no means, an ordinary feat. The story is really quite plain and eternally evolving, but the approach is levelheaded and purposeful. There were lengthy spells when I grew restless and then there were spells when I wanted the film to go slower to soak up the detailing. It succeeds in providing an authentic, often amusing and disheartening depiction of how a lower court functions and how an acquitted person ultimately ends up being a casualty of its quirks. The writing is incisive and dryly funny, with seemingly improvised dialogue lending a layer to the film's naturalistic setting.

What impressed me above all was Tamhane's attention to the technicalities. The camera is usually static and penetrating, rarely capturing any intimate close-ups of the characters (a premeditated move, as Tamhane stated in an interview previously) and that hinders us from studying them up close. The editing is--bafflingly--slack, which pokes me to pose the question: was it intentional and why? The pacing is languid, probably a figurative indication of the slow delivery of justice by the judicial system, but the editing pattern mildly frustrates.

Eventually, Court is nothing but a productive character study that supplies plenty of fodder to the intellect even if it is at times immensely indulgent. One is constantly compelled to question and interpret what each scene means, how it shapes the characters. It takes us deep into the minds of the people who are involved in the cases that are argued upon everyday in the drab courts. And the actors who play them, mostly non-professionals, are miraculous. The disparity between their personal and professional selves is what makes Court remarkable.

It's a debut of rare maturity and confidence and subtlety. Coming from an Indian filmmaker, this is an act of reassuring cynics like me that the film scene in this country is really changing.

Court is the best film I have seen all year, and possibly the best Indian courtroom-drama since Saeed Akhtar Mirza's 1984 satirical masterwork, Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho!. And after a long time, I was ecstatic to watch a film with an audience that recognized a great film when they saw it. I partook in paying a prompt homage to it by applauding when the end credits rolled.

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.

Review : Navdeep Singh's "NH10" is frighteningly familiar.

Some years ago, I watched a small marvel that drew heavily yet dutifully from Roman Polanski's 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown. The film in question had captured the tenor of rural India so accurately, I could almost feel the graininess of the barren highways and dusty terrains. Navdeep Singh's impressively constructed Manorama: Six Feet Under was remade with faithful reverence and slid into an Indian setting so neatly, I soon forgot that the original story had a distinctly American flavor to it. 

NH10, his second feature that borrows this time from the terrifying and stunning 2008 British thriller that made sure I did not venture outside for a while, Eden Lake, is set in a starker environment that lacks the inspired lethargy of his debut's, but it gets the moody, vicious aura of the country's northern badlands on the mark. It's a tragedy, the scariest to come trudging along in a while, told with dogged brutishness and directness of manner, and that perhaps is what sets it apart from other Hindi films tackling a similar theme. There's no pontificating, no pomposity, which is surprising enough for a Hindi film that adopts a condemnatory approach to the atrocious problems that rural India has got itself entangled in. 

A trick that filmmakers often resort to to amplify the horror of two upright protagonists trying to cope with something unpleasant and unfamiliar to them is to show them leading a seemingly perfect, content life before deliberately plunging them in the bowels of brutality. It is a crafty ploy that never fails, and it is used to great effect in NH10. It cuts a disturbingly clear line between what is acceptable in the urban and rural parts of the country and how the law is reshaped in the two, which explains why an urbane couple from Gurgaon--the protagonists of this joyride--embrace their haplessness with wide-eyed alarm. For someone used to being cushioned by a law that works, the horrors of NH10 come across as ghastly - and utterly believable. 

After the story switches gears and inevitably transfigures into a functioning chase film, Singh controls the growing suspense with considerable deftness. Most of the action happens in the desolate stretches of arid land next to the highway against the black skies, an added bonus for a chase film, and with only a handful of characters. It's deeply satisfying to be a part of a no-frills, uncomplicated narrative that only wishes to toy with suspense, violence, fear and long, anxious silences, and Singh leisurely milks every moment to make it worth your time. For the most part, this goes down rather well, with the actors bringing a sense of credibility complete with the dialect of the region to their vaguely-sketched characters, until too many coincidences render the narrative strained and fabricated instead of organic. 

And it's such a damper. For a bracing final showdown, Singh and his writer Sudip Sharma inundate the story with absurd twists that intend to give a quick glimpse into the minds of those who perpetrate honor killings or defend them, but it doesn't add any juice to either the plot or the characters. The final fifteen minutes make a strong case for feminism, and the grim, undeniable pleasure one feels to watch these sexist men, who habitually refer to women a Hindi slang term for "whore," getting violently harassed one by one by a resolute woman with a crushed conscience is overwhelming and, in a mad way, comforting. (The guy sitting next to me loudly called for the act of revenge to be grislier and cheered when the plucky female protagonist went for these men on her own, and I did not shush him.) 

However, that does not make up for its failings. The film never pays a nod to its original. The twists are feeble in their impact, and the characters often do things only characters in a movie would think of doing. If only the film would have been more naturalistic and the late twists would have been discarded entirely, it would have been a more accessible, more urgent film. If only. 

The worst thing a thriller can be is predictable, and NH10 unfortunately is an addition to that category. But, the best thing a predictable thriller can be is satisfying. And the macabre NH10, with its socially aware zeal and determination to unmask the perpetual feeling of dread our women have to walk around with everyday, falls into that category, too.