In this era of cookie-cutter Bengali cinema, where the angsty songs sound very much the same, Bohurupi, comes along, defying genres, yet thoroughly entertaining (you may even term it masala) with good music, fantastic performance and a story, however glib, holding it nicely altogether.
It kind of explodes in your mouth in a burst of flavours to steal a line from the Masterchef jury! More than a review, one is keen to make some observations in our industry’s story-telling techniques that are gradually getting a makeover, if only a teeny-weeny bit.
The director duo of Nandita Roy and Shiboproshad Mukherjee has sought to correct that for a while now. They make films that are indeed middle-of-the road for their good production values, but appealing to a wider audience.
A film can never exist in a society in a vacuum. It has to have audiences. For far too long our films have preached to an audience of bhodrolok – read that as middle-class – that always preaches to be on the side of the downtrodden while aspiring to be upper class. In a bid to be commercial, some of these films also started remaking the stories emanating from the south and western parts of India.
Their latest Bohurupi running successfully is one such film. Bohurupi/roopi as the word suggests means many (bahu) roop or faces. The bohurupi community was a band of itinerant entertainers who disguised themselves as different characters (mythological, animals) and roamed the countryside. They entertained the public with song and dance; the songs sounding like rhymes were made up almost impromptu.
Many of them doubled up as jatra artistes at other times or sang popular folksongs for a few pennies. It is said that they were used by the British as informers and spies during our freedom struggle.
Today such entertainers, who may have tilled the land at other times, are reduced to begging, when not looking for any kind of work.
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Filmmaker Sekhar Das in his Kaler Rakhal (2009) based on a story by Nilanjan Chatterjee – Du Nombor Ashami was about one such bohurupi who doubles up as doing time for petty criminals. The story in that film was different and sought to comment on the socio—economic conditions in rural Bengal and the changing face of rural India. The question of the loss of livelihoods was just an aside in the film.
In the recent film, the directors in trying to tell a story about two individuals – a robber and a policeman – integrate this concept of a facet of rural Bengal. Even as the story is pared down of any intellectual narrative, it is layered and gets straight to your heart.
The script is based on a chain of real bank heists carried out in Raipur, South 24 Parganas in West Bengal between 1998 and 2005. The back story of the man who does it in the film, ably assisted by his gang including a woman, is a sad one beneath all the high action drama, with doses of love, revenge and human frailties.
With the kind of fare available on OTT channels, gone are the days of simplistic story telling. In a bid to have nuanced characters, the police inspector here has to grapple two sets of problems: one in his career and the second, in his domestic space. Similar to the detectives of western series who are often depicted to battle their own inner demons, policeman Sumantra Ghosal, played by Abir Chatterji, discovers that his newly married wife is on the bi-polar spectrum, a rising concern in any society today.
Does devoting time to someone suffering somewhat mitigate the problem? And what if, the spouse is so busy that he just cannot get away from his duties, despite the best of intentions. The question of self-destruction works at both levels.
The hero or let’s call him the anti-hero Bikram Pramanik (Shiboprosad) is not only falsely implicated in murder by his own family members but is a retrenched jute mill worker. Once he takes to robbing countryside banks, he becomes the modern Robin Hood. He does not keep anything extra for himself though it is the village-smart pickpocket, the robust and earthy Jhimli, his partner, who actually steals our heart, with her demand for “commission” etc.
“Have you noticed she never makes eye contact,” observes someone in the film. “That’s because she has been eyeing men’s pockets all her life”. It is a well-cast film, shorn off the urge to portray the police wife Pori (Ritabhari Chakraborty) with perfect looks. She looks rightly disturbed. On the other hand, Jhimli (Kaushani) oozing sex appeal adds to the entertainment quotient by the addition of an item number in a film. Why ever not?
Shorn off gimmicks, the film is Chaplinesque in that comedy overrules everything but hides a deeper meaning within. Who are the actual thieves and dacoits in our society? The State Machinery, corporates? The tragedy is not about an innocent man being wrongly framed for crimes he did not commit but can we pick Pramanik over Sumantra Ghosal who is an honest cop?
Told partly in songs rooted in Bengal, the music too sets the film apart, with its use of indigenous musical instruments and chora by an actual bohurupi, Nonichara Das Baul. He alludes to everyday life like oi parar sasurira bouma chena na (a dig at Bengali TV serials?) and the refrain ei beshi takash na, biya diye debo, kende more jabe kept the audiences in splits.
Roy and Mukherji have indeed cracked the code of the middle-of-the road cinema reaching out to larger audiences. Their Belasheshe found a resonance with audiences who do not speak Bengali and Shibu’s portrayal of one character after the other – such as Laltu Dutta in Ramdhanu etc, is only getting better.
For far too long we have carried the heavy baggage of trying to emulate the cinema of Ray without success. Let us start changing the narrative of trigger happy men with abuse on their lips. Let’s have some dang, dang, dang!
Image Courtesy: Banglalive.com
