I’ve given
up on Bangla movies. After many years of trying, and many experiences of
murderous rage after watching “recommended” and “bhalo” arty Bangla movies, I finally
just quit. Professor Shonku, however, was a much beloved childhood literary character,
and Man and I discussed whether we should chance it. His take was that we
might, given that it is directed by Sandip Ray, Satyajit’s son, who – man thought
– would be more likely to handle his father’s creation well. I wasn’t so sure,
and so not convinced, and the matter was left unconcluded, undecided.
When monkey’s
new year’s eve plans fell through, and an attack of the “weepies” happened,
however, I figured –“what the hell”. There wasn’t anything else to watch,
Dabangg 3 and Good Newwz being far more unwatchable, and any other possible
plans made no sense given the fact that everyone and their uncle would be at
the same malls, restaurants, and destinations. So – on the principle of the
least of all available evils – we booked ourselves 3 tickets to go see
Professor Shonku o El Dorado. Thank god the tickets were cheapish, or I would
have been far more enraged than I am now!
I marvel at
the decline of both Bengali film making and of Bengali viewership that this
movie was “highly recommended” to me! It is a Bad film overall. First of all,
for an adventure film, it is – as Bengali Aantel Marka films are wont to be –
extremely slow. It could easily have been at least 30 minutes shorter – and should
have been, in my opinion. No one really talks that slow, or takes that many
pauses, or gives that many “meaningful” looks while conversing. The only thing
this kind of acting and direction manages to do is make the whole thing
artificial, and fake. Normal speed conversations, simpler conversations, and a
faster pace for the overall film would have made life much easier for poor
mindlessly bored viewers like me.
Secondly,
why wasn’t anyone checking for continuity, timeline errors, tying up loose
ends, and basic things like that? That’s one of the first things one learns to
do when writing, especially writing a script! We are told – in a totally
unnecessary opening sequence – that the professor has been missing and presumed
dead for many years, having disappeared around 2010… and a diary has recently
been found, written by him dated 2012 marked (2). The (2) business is never
explained during the course of the film, and the 2012 business becomes very
strange because as the character (there for about 5 mins overall) in the
opening sequence begins to read the diary, he is taken back to the time when
Shonku was still happily living in his house at Giridih…. So…. If he was in his
own home in 2012, how was he missing for 2 years? Didn’t anyone simply go to
his house to check if he was there? Also, during the entire subsequent
adventure, detailed in the diary presumably, literally hundreds, if not thousands,
of people knew where he was! From the university in Sao Paolo who had invited
him to speak and were giving him an honorary doctorate to random Brazilian billionaires
who wanted to buy patents to all his inventions….so how is he classified as
missing again?
Also, the
person who brings in the diary to sell it to the reader in the opening
sequence, mentions that it was found in a crater created by a meteor hitting
somewhere in the Sundarbans, of all places. Which leads to another major
question and a major loophole. How did the diary, presumably written in Giridih
and Sao Paolo end up in a meteor crater in West Bengal? Well, no one ever
bothers to explain that, not in the course of this movie at least.
A large
part of the narrative of the movie takes place in Sao Paolo, Brazil… but the people
there have some really interesting accents. For example, the head of the
Brazilian University, a woman with a Portuguese origin Brazilian name, has a
very pronounced north American, US, accent. Her “secretary or assistant” has
this on again off again sort of generic latinx accent. But the few times he
uses supposedly “Portuguese” words, like serenista for example, not only are
they off – language wise – they are also off accent wise. Shonku’s two white
friends, one supposedly a Brit and another a German routinely drop their
accents, and even manage to exchange them once in a while! So, to someone who
is even a little bit sensitive to speech, or cares even a tiny bit about authenticity,
the whole business is very annoying and disorienting. I would rather they all
had neutral accents than each one having precisely the wrong one in pretty much
every scene! The dialogues were also written, I believe, by someone not
familiar with the differences between Indian, US, and UK English or the way
LatinX native language influence would affect someone speaking in English. So,
not only are the English dialogues in all the wrong accents, they are very
often also the wrong sentence structure! In short, everyone speaks weirdly, and
everyone speaks like an Indian and a Bengali (presumably Sandip himself).
There was
some hope that an essentially sci-fi franchise like Shonku would benefit from
modern CGI technology and the result would be an excellent visual treat. Sadly,
that did not happen. Maybe here was where Sandip had needed to really apply
some of his creativity. I realized, as I watched, that many of the miraculous
seeming inventions of the professor – like the miracurall medicine that cures
all known diseases – were far more believable in the 70s and 80s when both the
world and I knew far less than we do now about what causes diseases and how
wildly different one can be from another. So, some tweaking there might have
benefited the overall narrative and removed some sense of the jarring mismatch.
And the quality of the CGI was widely uneven from scene to scene. Where the virtual
phone display was quite well done, the same cannot be said of the holographic
calls or the ball lightning.
And really,
it all brings me back to direction. Sadly for him, and me, Sandip is no
Satyajit Ray…. Not even close. Bad direction, bad editing, bad acting (yes,
even from Dhritiman), bad script, all manage to combine to give us a perfectly
insipid film. This was an adventure story. Where was the tightness? The excitement?
The sense of anticipation and wonder? Sadly, missing. All it ended up being –
as a film – was just another self-important, bloated, heavy handed, pseudo
intellectual bag of hot air.
