Dark streets and dhotis.

 Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay created Byomkesh Bakshi in 1932, and continued to chronicle his adventures until 1970.  Initially, Byomkesh was closely modeled on Sherlock Holmes; he's an eccentric Bengali intellectual who solves crime through his powers of logic and observation, and is assisted by his loyal friend and roommate Ajit Bannerjee, who also chronicles his adventures.  Byomkesh quickly grows beyond Holmes pastiche, though.  He marries, has a son, buys a car, and develops his own eccentricities as the years pass.  One of his quirks is a dislike of the word 'detective', or worse, 'investigator.'  Byomkesh refers to himself as a Satyanweshi, a seeker of truth, so I don't think he'd approve of the title of 2015's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!.  He would also be suspicious of the exclamation mark.

The movie opens in 1943 Calcutta. Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a recent college graduate who already has a reputation for being extremely clever and kind of annoying.  That's why Ajit Bannerjee (Anand Tiwari) approaches him for help in finding his father, Bhuvan Bannerjee (no actor listed, because SPOILER he's dead and doesn't actually appear in the movie.)  At first, Byomkesh isn't interested, but his girlfriend (Moumita Chakraborty) just announced her engagement to someone else, and he really doesn't have much else to do, so finding a missing person it is!

 

Byomkesh starts his investigation by visiting the hostel where Bhuvan was staying, where he meets the brilliant Doctor Anakul Guha (Neeraj Kabi.)  After some intellectual jousting, Byomkesh finds Bhuvan's paan box, which is filled with cash, keepsakes, and Bhuvan's personal paan formula, which he called 'Calcutta Kiss.'  Byomkesh concludes that Bhuvanm has been murdered, and visits the now-abandoned factory where he used to work and runs into the factory owner's wife and the film's designated femme fatale, film actress Anguri Devi (Swastika Mukherjee).

 

And from there . . . well, it's a mystery, and I don't want to give too much away.  But Byomkesh crosses paths with a violent Japanese dentist (Taka Higuchi), a wealthy politician (Kaushik Ghosh) and his firebrand nephew (Shivam) and sensible niece (Divya Menon), and the notorious drug lord Yang Guang, a master of disguise, manipulation and stabbing.  (One might almost call him the Napoleon of Crime, but nobody actually does.)

 

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is not a direct adaptation of any of the Byomkesh Bakshi stories.  Instead, it draws elements from several stories, and then scales them up.  Byomkesh is still the same satyanweshi as before, but this time he's not just solving a clever murder, he's battling his own personal Moriarty in order to save Calcutta from utter ruin.  It's very pulpy, but played entirely straight rather than giggling at its own over-the-topness.

 

There are a lot of movies and TV shows about Byomkesh Bakshi, but it is a shame that, due to Sushant Singh Rajput's untimely death, we're never getting the sequel to this version.  It's a movie that earns its exclamation mark.

Retail therapy.

 When I first started blogging, being an American Bollywood fan was a bit more complicated than it is now.  Netflix had a decent selection of Bollywood DVDs available, but for the most part when you wanted new stuff you would find an online retailer, browse their catalog for something that looked interesting, and then . . . take your chances.  Sometimes the movie was good, sometimes it was terrible.  Sometimes the DVD had no subtitles.  Sometimes it turned out to be obviously and badly pirated.  It turned the movie watching experience into an adventure.

Things are different now.  There's an ocean of Indian cinema available at the literal push of a button, and rather than waiting weeks to finds out if a movie is any good, I can watch it right now.  It's great.  It's genuinely better than the old way of doing things.  But I do miss the sixty nine cent DVDs you'd pick up to round out an order; they had devotionals, mythologicals, duplicate movies, Z-movies, and the embarrassing early output of major stars.  These are movies that aren't easily available on streaming platforms, and while some of the DVDs are still out there, they cost a lot more than sixty nine cents, and they're very hard to find. 

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I am so happy to have maybe tracked down an affordable copy of Tum Mere Ho, the famously bad snake movie starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla.  Will the picture quality be any good?  Will the DVD have subtitles?  How bad can it possibly be?  I can't wait to find out.

Meanwhile, no new review this week.  I watched Awara Paagal Deewana, only to discover that I've already reviewed it.  You can read the old review here; I pretty much agree with Me From the Past.

My beloved is like lemonade.

 As Jab We Met (2007) opens, Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) is having a bad day, week, month and year. His father has died, the family corporation is struggling, he's locked in a very messy courtroom battle with his estranged mother (Divya Seth Shah), and his longtime girlfriend has married someone else.  Desolate, Aditya walks out of a meeting and just keeps walking, eventually finding himself on a train to Delhi.  Aditya contemplates throwing himself off, but he's interrupted by Geet (Kareena Kapoor), a fellow passenger who will not stop talking.

 

 Geet is persistent, even though Adityaa clearly wants to be left alone.  When he gets off the train during a late night stop, she follows.  And then she misses the train!  Geet is furious, and demands that Aditya escort her home to her family in Punjab.  Aditya agrees, because he's got nothing better to do and because he's kind of bemused by Geet, the dreamiest of manic pixie girls.

 

So, the pair make their way across India.  There are adventures.  More importantly, there are conversations.  Aditya tells Geet about his broken relationship, his broken family, and his broken dream of becoming a musician.  Geet tells Aditya about her very traditional Sikh family and her secret boyfriend Anshuman (Tarun Arora), who is not a Sikh and with whom she is planning to elope.By the end of the trip, Aditya obviously has a thing for Geet, but she's sticking with Anshuman, and in the spirit of compromise suggests that Aditya elope with her sister Roop (Saumya Tandon) instead, and then they can all go live in the mountains together.

 

When they arrive in Punjab, Geet''s family are initially suspicious of Aditya, but after she explains how he helped her they insist on him staying for a week so that they can thank him properly.  He has a wonderful time, but when Geet decides it's elopin' time, he still feels compelled to help her.  There's another roadtrip as the pair make their way to Manali, in the far northern part of India, but this time it's handled with a single song.  Once they reach Manali, Aditya says his goodbyes and walks away before Geet goes to meet Anshuman.

 

Aditya goes home and transforms his life.  He transforms the business into a major success, reconciles with his mother, and even takes up singing again, and everything he does, he does because of Geet.  "Your absence is like your presence," he sings; while he misses her, she's always in his heart, and that gives him the strength to carry on and live his best life.  And then, nine months later, Geet's family tracks him down and demands to know what he's done with their child, because the movie's only halfway over.

Many Bollywood movies will mix up the genres, combining romance with action and comic relief and magic realism.  This is the straight stuff, pure uncut Bollywood romance.  And it works, largely because of the characters.  Aditya is not only rich and handsome and talented, he's an astonishingly decent person, able to take no for an answer and still do everything possible to help the woman he loves without hoping for a reward.  He's very honest about his love for Geet, but he's quick to add, "But that's my problem."  (Of course Aditya gets the girl in the end, but when he does he is genuinely surprised.)  And Geet is free spirited and quirky in the first part of the movie but shifts believably to dour and cynical in the second.  It would be easy to make her into a caricature, but Kareena Kapoor presents her as a well rounded person with agency and dreams of her own, rather than as a motivation for Aditya's character development.  Jab We Met came out only four years after Kareena's widely panned (including by me) performance in Khushi.  The growth in her confidence and skill is remarkable.

 

While I love a good masala flick at least as much as the next guy (probably more) it's okay to just do one thing if you do it well.  Jab We Met does one thing really well.

. . . is an ungrateful stepsibling.

David Dhawan is famous for directing a number of incredibly broad, incredibly formulaic comedies, often starring Govinda or the director's son, Varun Dhawan, and with further comic relief provided by some combination of Shakti Kapoor, Johny Lever, Kader Khan, and/or Paresh Rawal.  The movies are sometimes tasteless, predictably predictable, and irregularly funny, but when you watch a David Dhawan movie, you know what you're getting.  And then there is his first hit, Swarg (1990).  While Govinda and Paresh Rawal both have important roles, this is perhaps the least David Dhawany David Dhawan movie I have ever seen.

 Kumar (Rajesh Khanna) is a wealthy businessman with a large family, including his wife Janki (Madhavi) and much younger stepsiblings Ravi (Dilip Dhawan), Vikram (Raja Bundela), and Jyoti (Juhi Chawla), along with Ravi's wife Naina (Neena Gupta) and maybe Ravi and Naina have a son?  A kid shows up in a few scenes, but nobody ever really talks about him.  When his stepmother was dying, Kumar promised her that he would always take care of her children, and even took a vow that he would never have children of his own, a decision that I am sure will have no negative consequences.

And then there's Krishna (Govinda), the family servant.  Krishna was an orphan, taken in at a young age, and he views Kumar as a father, showing so much devotion that he;'s in danger of overdosing on filial piety.  Krishna is not a very good servant, but he is clever, loyal, and good at punching bad guys, skills which he puts to good use when rescuing Jyoti from a fate worse than death.  (It is nineties Bollywood, after all; you have to threaten the heroine with a fate worse than death at some point.)

 

In any case, it's a big, wonderful, loving family and everybody is so happy that they named the house "Swarg," because it is a heaven on Earth.  And then, Kumar wins the election to become president of the Mill Owners Association.  His predecessor Dhanraj (Paresh Rawal) is not happy, because he's been using the position to fill his own pockets for years, and he knows the scrupulously honest Kumar will not let the matter go.  Dhanraj sets out to ruin Kumar's happy home.

 

And he does!  It turns out that ruining people is surprisingly easy.  With the help of Nagpal (Bharat Kapoor), one of Kumar's employees, he manipulates Kumar into using the mansion as collateral to secure a large loan, a loan which becomes impossible to repay when the factory burns down.

Kumar is ruined overnight, and his stepbrothers reveal themselves to be selfish jerks who refuse to help the man who has supported them for so many years.  (Jyoti is played by Juhi Chawla and so remains virtuous.)  When Krishna has had enough and confronts them over their disloyalty, they frame him for stealing Jyoti's jewelry and he is thrown out of the house.  

 

Krishna travels to Bombay (the name won't officially change for another five years) and after a rough start, he meets a friend named Airport (Satish Kaushik), gets a job as a spot boy on a movie set, and accidentally becomes a rich and successful film star almost overnight.  Now that he has money and power and a loyal sidekick, Krishna returns home, determined to save his family, or at least avenge his fallen master.

Despite the different genre, David Dhawan still doesn't do subtle; this is drama rather than comedy, but it's still incredibly broad.  Dhanraj has two identifiable personality traits: he's evil, and he likes to remind people that he's from Gujurat.  Krishna is virtue personified.  Kumar is bound by his vow, and suffers nobly.  After the first half hour, nobody really has a chance to be funny, which is honestly a bit of a waste since half the cast have strong comedic chops; Juhi Chawla is right there, people!

 

The end result reminds me of a scaled down production of King Lear, swapping some of the play's cosmic nihilism for brightly colored dance numbers, because drama or no drama, Govinda is going to dance.  It's definitely not what I was expecting from David Dhawan.