Shri Swapan Kumarer Badami Hyena’r Kobole (2024) Movie Review: Before Batman, there used to be The Shadow. There used to be archetypal heroes like Doc Savage, or perhaps turn the clock forward a couple of years, and you had The Phantom, Mandrake. Heroes of pulp fiction, whose authors utilized imagination and a genuine propensity to live life on the edge. Vicariousness stemming from being stuck inside the mundanity of their lives urged them to move beyond the realm of normalcy to the realm of the fantastical.
Realism is secondary, and catharsis by volatility is primary. Stories needn’t be too long as long as the needs of the thrilling variety, of visceral and macabre, are met. Bengal, too, had one such author and storyteller in the form of Shri Swapan Kumar Bhattacharya, whose stories of Dipak Chatterjee conceptualized the city of Kolkata as a neon-noir splashed, exoticized hotbed of crime and the supernatural. But pulp fiction had a cost of existence, a fate that also used to be shared by sequential comics.
The differentiation between pulp fiction and “literature,” with all the play of the vernacular and prose, brought about a shroud of shame to these stories. Children would grow up reading the adventures of celebrated sleuths like Prodosh C. Mitter, AKA Feluda (authored by Satyajit Ray), Byomkesh Bakshi (authored by Sharadindu Bandopadhyay), and others of their ilk. Stories that would imply and deal with theft, murder, and crime of the titillating variety but within the auspices of language and logic of “bhodrolok” Bengalis rather than hearkening back to the sinewy, adventurers and B-movie noirs, the pulp fiction they clearly took inspiration from. And as these sleuths grew more popular among the consciousness of the audience, via the innumerable adaptations causing almost a chokehold of storytelling on the silver screen, Dipak Chatterjee and Swapan Kumar lay forgotten.
Into this dire straits of the Bengali film industry and storytelling enters Debaloy Bhattacharya. He is a lover of fiction, both pulp and classical. He is one of the few among modern-day Bengali directors who has a distinctive visual palette and flourishes of style amidst mixed scripts, some of his own, some furnished by others. However, the output of his filmography, Bhattacharya, has another thing in spades working for him, which most filmmakers, even amongst industries with deeper pockets and higher budgets, lack – a sense of vision and an eagerness to experiment.
Bhattacharya thus tackles Dipak Chatterjee, the grandfather of all popular detectives of Bengali fiction, by not calling upon any of the source material. Instead, his story deals with the process of creation of the city of Kolkata, housing two different iterations of Kolkata – the real and the ones open to the imagination of the author. In the world of the film, Shri Samarendranath Pandey, AKA Swapan Kumar (Paran Bandopadhyay), exists along with his creation Dipak Chatterjee (Abir Chatterjee). This is a world where all iterations of all famous sleuths exist, where the world lives with and comments upon reality. But Dipak Chatterjee is disillusioned and jaded, speaking in cynical overtones of the noir protagonist with a jaded outlook, given dimensions due to his creator’s expansion of the mind, but unable to act beyond his creator’s pen.
What would happen when the creation commented on the prowess of the creator? What would the picture be when the creation becomes cognizant of the different species of birds present in the world because of the creator’s current interest but is unable to move forward with the investigation without the limited literary prowess and the uncontrollable imagination of the creator holding him back?
Such is the push and pull constructed in the world where Dipak Chatterjee’s rogues gallery exists, in tandem with the world at large. But this is also a world open to bending its rules because the writer can choose to deflect a bullet and create a heroine whose tears transform into pearls, but it is also a world where these characters would be stuck in the middle of the ocean and are in service to writer’s block until the author literally chooses to scratch the story, restart the scene again.
At its core, “Swapan Kumarer Badami Hyena’r Kobole” is a loving satire. It’s a lampooning of the genre of stories the Bengali Film Industry had wrung itself to death, and it comments on the tropes of storytelling as well as the viewer’s propensity to seek a dopamine rush from nostalgia. There is a self-awareness working within the film that knows that the pulp fiction being told within the auspices of the meta-narrative makes strange choices because stories are at its core, always works in progress. The train races along the tracks while the tracks are being laid in front of it, barely managing to not derail the plot.
And because it is satire, it is hard not to enjoy this film with a big smile because watching this, you realize that this is a filmmaker not deconstructing or subverting a source material to be edgy. This is a filmmaker in love with the source material and bringing light to a forgotten, dusty piece of story in the only way he could choose to – experiment and bend, but not break. However, in an effort to be bold, Bhattacharya also becomes slightly indulgent. Brand advertisements in the film are cynical, but that brand of cynicism is incongruous with the cynicism and deliberate leaps of logic of the film, thus standing out unfairly. He tries to be self-aware about it at times but doesn’t really manage to remove the niggling feeling of watching a fly land on the ointment.
The casting is on point, and the role given to Abir Chatterjee, one of those actors who has been Byomkesh on the silver screen for a generation, played a version of Feluda and is currently also famous for essaying a modern Bengali take on Indiana Jones. The self-deprecating humor hits harder because Abir plays that disillusionment perfectly. As an actor who had famously taken a break from essaying Byomkesh, the world-weariness rings true. His relationship with his creator, Paran Bandopadhyay, is easily the highlight of the film, and the thespian also beautifully essays the role of an author more interested in crafting visceral stories with sharp volatility and magic rather than stories with added weightage. The battle is between the creation, who wants to be legitimate, and the creator, who wants the glory days of pulp fiction and that same readership back.
And like any form of media slowly threatening to die out, it could either choose to stubbornly remain the same, or it could choose to be slightly different and be cognizant of its audience rather than chasing the “mythical new audience” with the same verve. “Shri Swapan Kumarer Badami Hyena’r Kobole” proves that the book shelves in the Bengali household, and the regional films in the theatres, have space for offbeat stories. It has space for gorgeously shot, primary colour-heavy cinematography by Ranyadeep Saha.
It has space for editing by Sanglap Bhowmick, which alternates between slow and speedy ramp to give the impression of reading panels of a comic book. Most importantly, it has the space for a detective with two pistols in both hands, as well as a flashlight, to exist, acknowledging that logical fallacy is part of the charm. Perhaps that acknowledgment is necessary for the story to work, but it also brings in the pulp fiction within the meta-narrative to its natural conclusion, with a promise of a return of the character. Because pulp never promised to end. It always left you wanting for more. A love letter for pulp fiction could only end with a promise of a continuation.
