A Final Work That Lacks Finality

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.