Byomkesh Hatyamancha review: Abir Chatterjee as Byomkesh Bakshi leads efficient cast in mediocre film

Language: Bangla

The deal was always unusual for Abir Chatterjee this time around, for his new outing as Byomkesh Bakshi on the Bangla big screen is based on a story that was never completed. Director Arindam Sil and writer Padmanabha Dasgupta have drafted the screenplay of Byomkesh Hatyamancha (roughly translates to Byomkesh and The Curtain Call) from late novelist Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s unfinished story Bishupal Bawdh, or The Killing of Bishupal. The idea would have given the creative duo liberty to play around with an exciting core concept left unrealised by a genius mind.

Not all things unusual are exceptional. Sil, who scored a franchise hattrick with Har Byomkesh, Byomkesh Pawrbo and Byomkesh Gotro in the past, has this time managed to deliver a film that will go down as one of the more mediocre efforts among Byomkesh films. Despite an in-form Chatterjee returning for a record eighth time as the self-defined ‘satyanveshi’, or investigator of truth, Byomkesh Hatyamancha never really manages to realise the potential of an efficient cast or the scope that Bandopadhyay’s incomplete suspense saga provides.

Director Sil and screenwriter Dasgupta were perhaps overwhelmed by the richness of the material at hand. The story is set in 1971, a time in Bengal’s history when the state’s art and culture scene was as dazzling as its political climate was turbulent. Sil’s creative and technical teams have worked meticulously in setting up the milieu, capturing the socio-political essence of the era. A vintage radio set provides latest news on the Bangladesh liberation movement in an early scene. Off and on, slogans adorning Old Calcutta walls highlight scenes of Naxalite protests even as the narrative blends the fates of a couple of key characters with such violent reality. You spot posters of Dev Anand’s Gambler and Satyajit Ray’s Seemabaddha on walls of narrow winding lanes of the odd old city ‘para’, even as the narrative creates scope for the Calcutta theatre scene’s famed cabaret culture. In a prophetic conversation, Byomkesh wonders if such day would ever come when the city would forsake its thriving theatre properties to build residential and commercial complexes. Sil even reserves a spot of symbolism towards the end, when the camera captures the facade of an old-world theatre hall along with a hand-drawn rickshaw — a vehicle no longer visible in most parts of the city.

Captured with finesse by Anirban Chatterjee’s camera and rendered exquisitely through Debashis Debnath’s art direction, such scenes defining Calcutta of yore only end up having cosmetic value. Subjects as the Bangladesh war, the Naxalite movement or even the city’s bustling theatre culture are never really brought alive for what they were worth in Bengal’s socio-cultural history, or to leave significant impact in the storytelling process.

The problem does lie with the storytelling process. Sil and Dasgupta were obviously too obsessed with creating a story that would move in a different tangent from Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s original unfinished work. The biggest challenge, in this context, lay in filling the blanks that Bandopadhyay left in his incomplete work, and it shows. Sil and Dasgupta start off loyal to Bandopadhyay’s story, focussing on an important character, but they fail to flesh him out sufficiently in the rest of the story. The problem is apparent in their handling of most characters in the narrative. It is left to the primary actors to make most of a half-baked screenplay.

The narrative opens with a flashback account set in 1957. A man named Kalicharan, on witnessing his sister-in-law Malti in bed with a neighbour, Bishwanath Pal, throttles her to death. Kalicharan is jailed for 14 years but he threatens to kill Bishwanath, too, once he is out of prison. The narrative then cuts to 1971, when Byomkesh (Abir Chatterjee) and Satyabati (Sohini Sarkar) have moved to a plush home in Kolkata’s Keyatala area. Satyabati is expecting, and Byomkesh’s buddy, the author Ajit (Suhotra Mukhopadhyay), is too busy minting money. Amidst simmering Naxalite violence all around, Byomkesh and Satyabati, along with Ajit and their neighbour Pratul babu, decide to go watch a play, Keechak Badh. It is a performance of the Mahabharat lore, but with a new-age twist, involving Keechak played by the popular stage actor Bishwanath Pal (Kinjal Nanda), Draupadi essayed by actress Sulochana (Paoli Dam), and Bheem played by actor Brajadulal (Arna Mukherjee). Twist in the story comes when Bishwanath Pal, or Bishu Pal, ends up dead on the stage even as Byomkesh watches from among the audience.

This basic outline of the plot was left by Bandopadhyay, on which Sil builds the foundation of his narrative. Bandopadhyay left an outline pregnant with notions of love, lust, deception, greed and betrayal, to be played out against the volatile backdrop of Naxalite violence as well as Kolkata’s throbbing world of commercial theatre of the seventies. Sil is intrepid in trying to step into Bandopadhyay’s boots and imagine a story as the latter would done. Only, he fails to show the same courage in execution. He sticks to a narrative structure familiar to many other films of the whodunit genre, reducing his effort to average fare. Worse, in his urgency to associate the real-life trio of Bishu Pal, Sulochana and Brajadulal with the mythical Keechak, Draupadi and Bheem, he goes lax on maintaining the suspense quotient.

The pairing of Abir Chatterjee and Sohini Sarkar as Byomkesh and Satyabati has always clicked and you look forward to the duo in this film, too. The screenplay, surprisingly, creates little scope for chemistry. The actors seal it with a kiss in the final scene, but you miss the sparks. Suhotra Mukhopadhyay as Ajit, Paoli Dam as Sulochana, Kinjal Nanda as Bishwanath Pal, and Arna Mukherjee as Brajadulal do their best to outshine a shoddy script.

The fact that Arindam Sil has chosen an unfinished Byomkesh story could have been the film’s big advantage, because every Byomkesh fan was always eager to find a satisfactory end to this tale. They won’t find it here and that is the undoing of Byomkesh Hatyamancha, a film that’s otherwise okay as a one-time watch (we’d still suggest hang on for the OTT release). This Byomkesh adventure is an interesting experiment, only they forgot to write it right.

Byomkesh Hatyamancha is released in theatres

Rating: * * and 1/2 (two and a half stars)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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