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
