Language: Hindi
Sambha from Sholay, Kachra from Lagaan, Bob Biswas from Kahaani … when characters who are barely in a film’s story remain memorable, you should know you have watched something special.
Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani was special. Nine years after that Vidya Balan starrer created waves at the box office, here at last comes the spin-off that has been crying out to be made ever since: Bob Biswas written and co-produced by Sujoy, directed by debutant Diya Annapurna Ghosh, his daughter.
Back in 2012, this is what I wrote in my review of the original: “Kahaani is one of those rare Hindi films that marries intelligent casting with a wonderful script. Actors for even the tiniest roles have been chosen with affection for the writers’ vision. So not only do the three leads deliver remarkable performances, but you come away from the film remembering even Saswata Chatterjee playing the destined-to-be-iconic Bob Biswas, the eerie undercover contract killer whose total screen time would not add up to many minutes.”
In 2021, Bob as played by Abhishek Bachchan (credited here as Abhishek A. Bachchan) is a not-so-eerie, apparently gentle soul who has just woken up from a long coma following a near-fatal accident and has no recollection of his past. He has a wife and son – he knows that only because they pick him up from hospital and take him home. There he meets the fourth member of their family: a daughter. So that’s the happy foursome: Mary (played by Chitrangda Singh), little Benny (Ronith Arora), the teenaged Mini (Samara Tijori) and Bob.
Mini is preparing for her Class 12 board exams, Benny is being bullied in school and Mary’s boss at work is a sexual predator. Added to this mix is a drugs racket in the city of Kolkata where Bob Biswas is based, and characters from Bob’s earlier life who variously nudge, force or aid him to do things he did not realise he was capable of.
Initially, the going is good. With the help of DoP Gairik Sarkar’s sombre palette and the script, Diya efficiently builds a world of intrigue with enough question marks scattered around the plot to sustain interest. The foremost among them is this: how and why did nice, diffident Bob metamorphose into a conscienceless murderer-for-hire?
That question, it turns out, is never answered.
The in-depth character development that was Kahaani’s hallmark is nowhere to be found in Bob Biswas although, apart from credits for the story (Sujoy Ghosh), screenplay (Sujoy Ghosh) and dialogue writing (Sujoy Ghosh and Raj Vasant), a separate credit has been given – to Aniruddha Chakladar – for “character development”.
The titular protagonist is not the only one who suffers from sketchy writing. Everyone else does too. Mary, Benny and Mini have promise but never become fully formed individuals in their own right.
Chitrangda looks ravishing, I loved her styling, her sexy nighties and pretty saris, and Ronith Arora is so huggable that I would pay to watch a poster of him on your wall, but these are not sufficient reasons to root for their characters as it gradually becomes clear that there is not enough of them to go around. Making her on-screen debut here, Samara Tijori – actor Deepak Tijori’s daughter – shows considerable potential in the film’s best-written supporting role, but in the end, the overall takeaway from Bob Biswas is of these characters hovering in the background of Bob’s life but never coming into their own. This is obviously a disappointment, coming as it does in a film that has been spun off from another major film in which a minor character who was in it for just minutes remains etched in viewer consciousness enough to merit a spin-off.
When the first killing takes place in Bob Biswas, the killer’s surprise at his own actions is oddly amusing. Then a second killing occurs and we see the executioner’s instinct falling into place. He still has no idea how he got into it. Okay then, so that’s what this film will be about? Is killing like cycling, swimming and driving – once learnt, never forgotten? But the script does not delve into that subject. As it heads off in other directions, it creates the impression of wanting to be a black comedy, but is unable to pull that off either.
What I really enjoyed about Bob Biswas is the fact that Bob and his family are Christians – a minority community rarely represented in Hindi cinema since the 1990s – with their religious identity not being used as a plot point and without most of the stereotypical markers Bollywood used to slap on to Christian characters up to the ’90s, barring these two: one line written for a priest in the film harks back to clichéd Hindi film Christians who, unlike real-life Indian Christians, insist on saying “God” instead of “Bhagwan” even while speaking Hindi; and when Mary enters a church, an English song immediately starts playing in the background. Across India, you will find mass being offered in churches in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi and other Indian languages, depending on the state and the population composition of each parish. It would have been nice to see this film rising above Bollywood’s desire to perennially associate English with India’s Christians (a stereotype that comes from the widespread view in north India of Christianity as a Western religion, when in fact it originated in Asia). It is worth noting here that Sujoy Ghosh produced Ribhu Dasgupta’s underrated 2016 Hindi film Te3n, which too depicted Indian Christians as regular people, not exotica, and largely shorn of earlier Bollywood clichés.
Bob Biswas get its politics right in this department, but falls short elsewhere.
As the focal point of the film, Abhishek Bachchan has worked hard on his body for this role, gained weight for it, and altered his posture. He also makes a glaringly inconsistent effort to adopt a Bengali accent. That slip-up is marginal though compared with the fact that unlike Saswata Chatterjee in Kahaani, Abhishek never quite gets under Bob’s skin. While he must take some responsibility for that, the truth is that the script itself – unlike Kahaani’s script – never quite gets under Bob’s skin. Bob Biswas has its moments, but in totality struggles to lift off.
Bob Biswas is streaming on ZEE5.
Rating: **
(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad)
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