Starring: Paran Bandyopadhyay, Bibhu Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Parambrata Chatterjee, Srilekha Mitra
Directed by Anik Datta
Rating: 
There’s a small sequence in Ray’s classic Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne in which a sprite materialises out of thin air and grants boons to the hapless comic duo Goopi and Bagha, changing their lives. If you take that brilliant, but compressed, moment out of the master’s film and stretch it for about two hours, you get Bhooter Bhabishyat. Anik Datta’s is a sort of tribute replete with references to Ray. It is reminiscent of him too, creating the same kind of magic, taking you on a satire-studded, dream-dotted journey in which past, present and future merge in dazzling disregard for the “normal”.
In Dutta’s story, it’s the ghosts that need help. Evicted from their natural habitats as trees are felled and old buildings are razed to make way for malls and multiplexes, ghosts of the past (like Siraj, a trusted bawarchi who gave his life in the Battle of Plassey) and the present (a Bangla Band member who overdosed) gather in an old Calcutta mansion. When this comes under attack, the ghosts spook an aspiring director into making a film on their plight, organising money for it from hidden treasures.
Taking a dig at Bengali society, from the filmmakers who identify with Fellini and Ghatak to the angst-ridden intellectual rebel, who comes to the other world wearing his Che Guevara T-shirt, the film unfolds like a tapestry of sepia-tinted flashbacks and black ’n white forays into the ghoulish greed of the present, sewn together with spoofs, puns, humour, songs and dances.