Shonku, Sandip, and why I have given up watching Bangla movies

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.

What an enormous waste of time! The only thing the movie really achieved is reinforcing my resolve never again to bother to spend time, energy, and money on ANY Bangla movie, Ever!