Rituparno Ghosh’s last film Satyanweshi will forever
leave many questions unanswered. Foremost is the question: Is this what
Rituparno imagined as his director’s cut? Would he have re-shot some scenes or
changed some others as the film took shape? We will never know. We will have to
live with the film as it is.
The most striking feature of Satyanweshi is its
impossibly slow pace, at least for the first 60 to 75 minutes. It does pick up
but by then, it’s too late. Even Shubho Mahurat, Rituparno’s earlier detective
thriller, was largely slow. But it was never slow enough to make the audience uneasy.
Was the pacing a deliberate ploy, like the static
camerawork, perhaps to match the tempo of 1950s Bengali detective films? Like
those movies of a bygone era, Satyanweshi is largely studio-bound, with very
little scope for tracking shots or pan shots. Why?
The film’s original story, Chorabali (by Saradindu
Bandopadhyay), has range enough for a well-mounted shikar scene and some
spine-chilling scare in the form of an unseen tiger on the prowl (remember the
hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles). But these promising devices are never
exploited, reducing Satyanweshi to a theatrical production more appropriate for
the stage.
The characters are mostly seated, not even once pacing
up and down the room or even walking across corridors or passageways in the
Raja’s mansion where most of the action takes place. Inexplicable!
If anything, it is the performances that take the
film a few notches up. Sujoy Ghosh, the hit director of Kahaani, in his first
acting role as detective Byomkesh Bakshi, is not half as bad as I had expected.
But some of his nods and stares look out of place, as if he missed the cue. In
appearance, he does capture the essence of a thinking Bangali bhadralok. He also
shows some spunk, as an actor, soon after being confronted by the Raja.
But going by his predecessors in the role, Sujoy
falls well short in not having an arresting personality. Rajit Kapoor, though
not a Bengali, is still the best Byomkesh on screen (although on TV). Anjan
Dutt’s Byomkesh, Abir Chatterjee, has the personality but not so much the ‘sharp
sleuth’ feel.
The most convincing of all actors in Satyanweshi is
Byomkesh’s Boswell, Ajit, played by Chandrabindoo band leader Anindya Chatterjee.
He pulls off the subdued, affable character remarkably well, reminding us of one
of his predecessors in the role, Sailen Mukherjee, in Satyajit Ray’s Chiriyakhana.
Indraneil Sengupta, as Raja Himangshu, looks right
but emotes sparingly as if afraid to cross unseen boundaries. Arpita
Chatterjee’s character, Aloka, could have been better etched. Kaligati, the
film’s central character played by Sibaji Bandopadhyay, never fully comes alive
to grab the audience’s attention.
Satyanweshi feels like an incomplete work, one that
is bereft of the touches that its master director would perhaps have lent it had
he lived to see the film released. It is unfortunate that Rituparno Ghosh’s
oeuvre should have ended this way.
Satyanweshi still makes for a very different watch
on a weekend. But go only if you can sit through the leisurely pace. Rituparno
Ghosh’s last film scores a 7.5 on 10 on my movie meter.
