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But this is a film that is put into motion and charged by its men, and its biggest weakness is its leading man: Sushant Singh Rajput plays at being Byomkesh, getting in some well-judged gum-shoeing glee in places, but never quite fills in the outlines.īut this is also one of those films that makes up for the principal actor’s deficiencies by the performances of those who surround him. She is the eye-catching glamour quotient of the film the ‘good girl’, played by Menon, has a couple of moments too. The Mata Hari like Mukherjee is perfectly accoutered, ivory-handled pistol and all. The pacing is languorous, and in the second-half, the stutters become obvious. It is the kind of film that I will recall and savour, flaws and all. ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!’ is a film that filled me to the brim. But by then, you have seen a film, a real, bonafide film, not bits and pieces of nonsense masquerading as one. The tension, which is on a slow-burn, leaches out, and the film ends as less than it could have been. When it switches to explicatory mode, it flattens. The film holds till the time these elements are in play.

It is a deliberate device which demands a slow build-up, characters mysteriously appearing and disappearing, and confusions getting confounded.

Noir demands a certain opacity, a certain whorliness in the tale telling, where not everything is obvious, and not everything is instantly clear. This becomes the backdrop for Byomkesh’s wanderings, as he goes about unraveling the mystery of the missing man, and the corpses pile up. The film opens at the half-way point of World War 2: refugees are flowing in from the Shanghai-Burma route, opium dens are flourishing in Chinatown, drug lords are in the ascendant and the city is trembling on the verge of a Japanese attack. The trams with those adverts, the ramshackle buildings, the streets pockmarked with the ‘puchka-walas’ are all spot-on. The re-creation is done with loving, lush camerawork which gives us both light and seductive shadows. And Banerjee scores a zinger when it comes to both.