Baishe Srabon – Bengali Movie Review

Consecutive movie reviews in the blog. Baishe Srabon is also by the same director Srijit Mukherji, who directed Hemlock society. When I googled his name, he stood out from most of the Bengali directors now a days except Ritupurno Ghosh. Bengali Cinema is also called as Tollywood. True to its name few actors like Veer and Dev had acted in only remake movies. Saddening to see the Bengali audiences were fed with remakes of Singham, Dookudu, Siruthai etc.,

This movie stars Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chatterjee and Raima Sen. This is entirely different genre than The hemlock society. The movie starts with a prostitute being killed at one night and the police find the body with a Bengali poem printed out in a paper. Seems that was the fourth murder in the city in past few months. The poems were found near all the dead bodies. Abhijt(Parambrata) is the inspector who handles the case and has good career record. That itself becomes a burden and he is frustrated by the fact that he cant find a break through in the case. This reflects in his personal life and his girlfriend leaves him.

Paralleled to this there is a struggling poet who had burnt a whole book exhibition 12 years back because his book didn’t get published. He leaves home at night in the pretext of seeing a publisher. He is very confident that his book will release soon. But he belongs to the hungry generation poets of Bengali literature, who were known to use the language in their poetry which the contemporary poets would never use.

Abhijit’s girlfriend works for a TV channel which takes advantage of the situation and wants to do a series about serial killers and the final one of the seires is a serial killer who is still alive and serving sentence. While researching she finds out this poet and the psycho killer were in same cell and the poet was the only person the killer would talk to.

The senior officer of Abhijit asks him to take the guidance of a suspended cop called  Prabir(Prosenjit). Prabir is known for his hard handedness and was dismissed from the service for staging fake encounters. The hard headed cop and the frustrated cop join hands and track down the psycho killer. Revealing anything more than this will spoil the fun if you are going to watch the movie.

The screenplay is so tight that if you are watching in computer, you will never even touch the mouse to move forward. Not even in the song sequence. There is always a chance to miss something and miss the wholeness of the movie. The dialogues are razor sharp. And importantly the story line of killing people and leaving poems written by the dead poets.

In Tamil, unfortunately if we have to remake this we will have to change the whole thing to cinema songs. Right from the sixties, cinema had ruled our mind that we cannot think of anything except cinema. If its a poem, it should have been in a song or otherwise people will find it hard to identify it. If its a song, it should have been in a movie or otherwise we will not recognize it. Till now when more than 10 people gather around, what we do is to play anthakshari or dumb charred using movie names or actor names. Such are we. The director banked on the extensive reading habit of the audience. And it paid off we should say.

Prosentjit is the main protagonist of the movie. He is at his Nonchalant best. Like all good actors he had his share of dancing around the bushes and made villains fly with sumos with single kick. But this movie should have been a welcome change for him. He was the one who acted in Siruthai/Vikramarkudu remake in Bengali.

Prambrata Chatterjee, I am becoming a fan of this guy. He knows how to underplay and also overreact without irritating. Should have got his fair share of characters. But I dont follow Bengali cinema that much. Until Kahaani I didnt notice him.

Gautham Ghosh as the poet. No words to justify his performance. You have to see it to believe it. As an outsider to Bengali literature, I dont know about hungry generation poets. This man with his few scenes and body language made me understand who they are. Hats off!

The dialogues need to have a special mention here. The cops while interviewing the poet ask

Cop : Dont you think, your ideologies wont match the democratic country like ours?

Poet : (Calls his servant) What is democracy?

Servant : Next month master! We need to go and vote.

Poet: (Looks at the cop) Got an idea?

The camera frame in this scene adds so much depth to the scene. And also the camera angles and movement in the last scene of the movie give so much depth to the ending.

If you are a fan of decent thrillers, this one is must watch.