I am not a Bengali, so I am unsuited to comment on the cultural and tonal anachronisms in Dibakar Banerjee's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, which seem to have sent a fair share of Bengali viewers into a tizzy, worried as they are that the (uncouth) rest of the country would, on the strength of the film, misjudge the delicate nuances of Bengali culture. Apparently, aloo bhaja is not had at tea time, a culinary tradition Sushant Singh Rajput's Byomkesh pays no heed to. While critics agree that Banerjee has captured the smoke-filled ambience of the erstwhile Calcutta boarding house well, some felt that Angoori Devi was an inappropriate name for a Bengali starlet, or that Byomkesh himself should not be a detective in the film. In Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's original rendition, he was only a "satyanveshi" (seeker of truth).
Banerjee, like most Bengalis of his generation, is a Byomkesh groupie (perhaps more so than the others: he wrote the foreword to a Puffin book on the icon). So it would be presumptuous to suppose that he let those tics in without judgement. Rather he may have simply chosen to walk a fine line between appeasing the home constituency and making a Yashraj-produced Bollywood potboiler.
In the 1990s, in the Doordarshan series by Basu Chatterjee that I watched as a kid, Rajit Kapur's Byomkesh would, say, parse the sounds of a typical Kolkata locality to hypothesise (correctly) that the killer used pins inside the bell on his bicycle that pierced the heart of the victim when the bell was pushed. It was the teasing out of such minor but important details that makes that series such a delicious memory. Kapur's Byomkesh unravelled the most unsolvable of cases solely on the dint of his powers of observation and ratiocination.
There is very little of such high-minded thinking in Banerjee's film. In fact, the villain here weaves such a mind-bogglingly complex web of deceit that it would be impossible for anyone to crack the case without a fair bit of nifty investigation. Rajput's unibrowed Byomkesh becomes a pawn in this elaborate setup, so that misguided by the villain's false leads, he mock-solves the plot again and again only for it to reveal deeper layers. To that extent, Banerjee's hero is indeed more in the mould of a James Bond or an Ethan Hunt than Chatterjee's Byomkesh. Maybe, as with his Hindi-inflected Calcutta, Banerjee was looking to reinvent the cerebral Byomkesh for a mass audience.
Having said that, by placing his Byomkesh squarely in the middle of an international conspiracy, Banerjee does overstep the purist line. An ordinary search for a missing man bleeds into a transnational war to control the ginormous opium trade that, if successful, would make Calcutta the drug capital of the world. The Calcutta police, helmed by a mostly stiff-upper lip English man, come across as bumbling fools who, in the classic tradition of Bollywood films, are always a step behind the seasoned detective. That Byomkesh single-handedly averts disaster is to his credit, but this fact invokes more than a usual dose of suspending disbelief on the viewer's part.
Of course, none of this lessens the thrill of the film. Banerjee takes great pains to recreate the Calcutta of the 1940s, with its bhadralok ethos masking chilling undercurrents. I especially loved the night scenes shot in the tantalising glow of the lantern. The movie's soundtrack, culled from a number of independent artists, complements its dark moodiness. This is particularly true for the foot-tapping Chase in Chinatown that plays just as the action on the screen seems to tip over into unexpected exposes. And I grudged what was only the briefest fight sequence towards the end that had all the makings of a luscious ode to Tarantino. More of all this in the next one, Dibakar, please!
Postscript: It's surprising that Banerjee has made a film about Kolkata so late in his career. He grew up in Delhi, a setting he employed to masterly effect in both Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! But clearly his conscience would not have let him continue as a film maker (not to mention the pressure he would have doubtless faced from the culturally conscious Bengalis) if he had not returned to the land of his forefathers. In that respect, his journey mirrors that of another Bengali film maker, Shoojit Sircar. Sircar made Yahaan set in Kashmir, the wildly successful Vicky Donor set in Delhi and Madras Cafe about the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka, before finally returning to Kolkata with this year's Piku.
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