Baishey Srabon

Night. The camera follows the silhouette of a streetwalker through dimly-lit, dingy bylanes. Suddenly, she stops. Someone throws a sharp stone slab at her. Yet, what’s more gripping, even as you shudder at the unmistakably vicarious terror of the opening subtitle sequence of the Bengali crime thriller Baishey Srabon, is what you don’t see...the unseen presence of another entity.

Going by his first film Autograph (an artful tribute to Ray’s Nayak), one would think a murder mystery would not be the preferred genre for Srijit Mukherjee to explore “alternative cinema” themes. It is also difficult to take an abstract idea and convey it convincingly through a linear narrative. However, Mukherjee does it with aplomb. How do you delineate on film the creative mind’s yearning for expression? The most powerful way perhaps would be to show its derangement when stifled. That’s the plot of Baishey Srabon. A serial killer is on the prowl on the streets of Calcutta. Cops are clueless and forced to hire the services of a brilliant, but disgraced, police officer.

Prosenjit delivers a superb performance as the washed-out sleuth, caustic, irreverent, and who lives “like a ghost” (“Ami toh onek agei morey gechi”—I died a long time ago) in a crumbling mansion, waiting and watching, whiskey in hand. Though he appears only mid-way through the film, he easily overshadows everyone else. It’s a treat watching him—totally, it seems, in character—smug on his moth-eaten, throne-like sofa, smirking at the upright, uptight police officer before him (Parambrata). There is charming, serendipitous humour in the dialogues, and Prosenjit displays a great sense of comic timing. Even if some of the lines are chauvinistic—“what size bra do you wear?” Prosenjit unexpectedly asks tough cop Parambrata when he gets a little mushy. Gautam Ghosh is endearing as the eccentric poet and is entirely convincing as he speaks to Rabindranath on the phone. He is the prime suspect as far as the audience is concerned, but that it’s a red herring is obvious soon.

Much of the subplot though is superfluous. Precious time is wasted on the Raima-Parambrata break-up when what we really want to witness is instances of the much-sought-after suspended sleuth’s much-hyped cleverness. Where is it? The music is disappointing, especially when you expect an encore of the super hit Amake Amar Moto Thakte Dao (Let me be) from Autograph. But the script is well-knit, and the editing, cinematography and sound crisp. Besides, the proverbial twist-in-the-tale is executed with precision and an entirely satisfying attention to detail.