Starring: Dhritiman Chatterjee, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kaushik Sen, Indraneil Sengupta
Directed by Saibal Mitra
Rating: ***
It’s past midnight. A row of pavement dwellers is sleeping on a Calcutta footpath. One of them wakes up to go to the bathroom. As he squats beside the kerb, a shadow appears behind him silhouetted against the streetlight. In a flash he is lying face down in a pool of blood, stabbed in the back. The police says that an unusual weapon was used: a porcupine’s quill (shajarur kanta).
This scene from director Saibal Mitra’s cinematic adaptation of one of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s stories featuring the legendary Byomkesh Bakshi is executed with so much heart-stopping suspense (camera panning slowly, music building up to a crescendo, sound of faint, steady footsteps) that by the time the next set of murders by the nocturnal serial-killer comes around you are numb with dread.
Usually the emphasis, as far as Byomkesh films are concerned, is on the protagonist’s razor-sharp intelligence, his cerebral interpretation of circumstantial evidence, his acute powers of observation and his intuition. The actual commission of the crime often remains in the background. But Mitra is able to integrate the essential Byomkesh brilliance with the sustained thrill of an unsolved mystery.
Written in the 1960s, Shajarur Kanta portrays an older Byomkesh (compared to the earlier stories which appeared in the 1930s with a younger ‘Satyanweshi’), and who better to bring out the measured, mildly sarcastic master sleuth than veteran Dhritiman Chatterjee, who interprets his character with his own erudite urbanity, slipping so well into Byomkesh’s skin that any successor would find it hard to shake him off.
Interestingly, the serial killings, powerful and integral as they are to the plot, are mere interjections punctuating the main story, which revolves around a love triangle between a recently married actress, her secret lover and her husband.
It is Byomkesh’s job to reveal the identities of both the serial killer and the lover. Konkona effectively plays a double role—portraying both the actress Deepa and also Deepa playing Tagore’s Nandini in a play (Raktakarabi) within the film and glides easily from the now-crafty, now-coy new bride to the passionately dramatic heroine. Kaushik has played a convincing range of characters in recent films—from sly politician and slimy husband to the angst-ridden thespian here. Indeed, Mitra’s casting is spot-on. Indraneil is the soft-spoken, gentlemanly, if sickly husband who could be as much a suspect as the unscrupulous bureaucrat-with-a-passion-for-theatre (Biswajit Chakraborty). Konkona as the wannabe Nandini is noteworthy, as it takes a good actress to portray a bad actress. Cinematography, editing, music, script combine to make this a memorable Byomkesh rendition. In the original, the killer’s penchant for porcupine quills is not fully explained. Mitra has his Byomkesh deliver dialogue that contains the clue.
