Silent Indian Cinema

No, this is not going to be some illuminating overview of the early days of Indian cinema. I can claim no appreciable knowledge of the same. These are my impressions of a DVD that contains surviving material of three silent films taken from the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Of the three films, two are from India's pioneer of film Dhundiraj Govind Phalke aka Dadasaheb: Raja Harischandra (1913), regarded as India's first feature film, is available only as a fragment containing the opening and closing reels, while Kaliya Mardan (1919) is present almost entirely. The last film in this set is a feature from Bengal, Jamai Babu (1931) by one Kalipada Das. Along with my impressions I have also given screenshots, click on the screenshots for the full resolution.

Both the Phalke films are based on famous incidents from Hindu mythology, obviously with an aim to differentiate them from foreign product and have immediate attention value amongst the Indian public. I suspect the decisions about which stories to adapt for film would have resembled the sequence in R.K. Narayan's Mr. Sampath (The Printer of Malgudi), where a film-making team brainstorms about their maiden production, trying to zero in on suitable stories from the mythos to adapt for the screen. If Phalke's two films set six years apart can be taken as an indication, there was not much evolution to his style. Of course, he was making films in the period when the mechanics of the trade were still primitive in most parts of the world and the added challenges of working in Indian conditions with the aim of producing material that would appeal to a film-illiterate Indian audience cannot be underestimated. However it stands that in these films, his style is generally that of filmed theater than an erudite visual language. Most shots are mid-range upfront, capturing naïve actors repeatedly performing a set of uncoordinated arm-waving gestures without any clear idea of the length and rhythm of the shot.

Another source of unintended humor is a practice Phalke, as depicted in the bio-pic Harishchandrachi Factory, unfortunately could not avoid - the use of cross-dressing men for female roles. The image in Kaliya Mardan of a flock of hirsute gopis grinning lasciviously at the child Krishna (incidentally played by Phalke's daughter Mandakini) is more disturbing than anything. Technically, panning of the camera is quite rare, and apart from the odd overhead shot in the last reel, I cannot recall the use of any striking camera angles or tracking movements. Occasionally he juxtaposes shots where characters in a room are looking out of a window at another scene. Apart from the use of some rudimentary visual effects for the climactic battle between young Krishna and the snake (an obvious rubber inflatable with the plug right on top of its head), this is about the extent of its difference from amateur theater.

What a world of difference in the 12 years between KM and JB. While no match at all for the genius of FW Murnau or Fritz Lang, the visual style in Kalipada Das' film is, of course due to the greater experience and exposure to better quality western cinema, more sophisticated and professional than the previous films. The story of a country bumpkin that lands at his in-laws' place in Calcutta and has a series of misadventures on account of his bumpkin-ness is quite modest and not particularly noteworthy, but the film's execution has a pleasing polish. The location shoots give a lovely view of the old city and have a quasi-documentary feel. The framing and the editing of these sequences (both credited to one D.R. Barodkar) are elegant. Camera pans are more frequent (not as an empty exercise in style), close-ups, juxtapositions, lighting schemes and non-theatrical angles are judiciously used, and there is, heavens, even the odd tracking shot. Considering that I have not even heard of this film, it was a lovely surprise and it would have been nice to have some access to Kalipada Das' other work (sadly, nothing else is known to survive at this point).

The NFAI DVD (authored by one Kriti Media Services and manufactured by Sony DADC) gives us an acceptable presentation of these films. Given the age and likely condition of the source material, we cannot expect miracles. That said, the bulk of Kaliya Mardan and Jamai Babu look quite acceptable (although Jamai Babu, despite being newer is more scratched and washed out). NFAI have specially commissioned scores for these films by composer Rahul Ranade and he obliges with material that sits comfortably with the style of the films. There are no extras apart from a dull slideshow of pictures of the NFAI screening facilities. A small interview or featurette on the restoration and presentation of the films on the DVD, or even a sitting with Rahul Ranade regarding his contribution would have been much appreciated. The package includes liner notes, carelessly printed on a very non-standard size leaflet. Oh well, just appreciate the good stuff while they still bother to put it out.

Gafla [dir. Sameer Hanchate]

The cover of the Gafla DVD says “India's first film on a stock market scam”, and I suppose that's true. Originally released in 2006 (and included in the London Film Festival that year), Gafla is a loose adaptation of the events leading up to and encompassing the Harshad Mehta scam of the 90's. Here we have Subodh Mehta (Vinod Sharawat) getting into the stock market world first as a wide-eyed apprentice with a brokerage firm, then climbing up the professional ladder. He eventually becomes his own boss and engineers resources at hand to manipulate stock prices that lead to a rigged bull-run. The expose of his attempt to fund his venture by illegally harnessing the resources of banks eventually lead to the end of his success story. Gafla portrays the Harshad Mehta character in a curiously whitewashed manner, as an entrepreneur who does what he does with the intention of expanding the stock market and increasing the investor base, thereby bringing democracy to the market and prosperity to the small investors. He is shown as a maverick crusading against a coterie of suited tycoons that for reasons of their own periodically crash the market. The Mehta of the film says that his investments are always in firms he has thoroughly researched for their potential and that by following his lead “the market will never crash”, something of a large swallow. His downfall is shown entirely as the work of his rivals in collusion with corrupt journalists.

To Gafla's credit it is a sincere and focused film that doesn't stuff in any needless commercial elements like songs, cheap sexuality or ornate romance sequences, and more importantly no significant detours from its plot line. Mehta is shown as someone willing to do anything to achieve his ends, including marrying for political advantage (without the usual associated melodrama for such moments). Vinod Sharawat in the lead role acquits himself in a decent manner. The problem however is that the treatment is linear and lacks any emotional strength. In a 2 hour film that charts a significant period of its protagonist's life, there are hardly any memorable moments; contrast this with Oliver Stone's Wall Street or David Fincher's The Social Network, which made sure to have a strong dramatic element in the progression of the story, and interesting characters.

Neither do Hanchate and his team have the creative chops to make the film interesting on a technical level. I don't know how much research was done for the project, but the portrayal of the workings of the stock market seem empirical and simplistic, little above the “Market mein saare shares khareed lo (buy up all the stock in the market)” depiction of business rivalry in several archaic Bollywood films and TV serials. Combined with production values and flat visuals normally associated with the more recent Dev Anand films, it feels more like a movie composed of footage excerpted from an 80's era Indian television serial. The presence of tele-serial actors of that period like Shakti Singh and Somesh Agarwal only adds to this feel.

The DVD of the film by one Junglee Home Video, claims to have an anamorphic transfer (and even instructs you about adjusting your TV settings for the same). But it is an amazing botch up job in which they have somehow managed to generate an anamorphic signal for a stretched out 4:3 image. To illustrate, I have here modified one of the film's images to a 4:3 ratio and you can see that this looks less distorted than the original so-called anamorphic image (yep, Vikram Gokhale isn't THAT fat :D).

Original "Anamorphic"

Resized to 4:3

The film also has an official website HERE.

Dracula [dir. Terence Fisher]

This is going to be rather embarrassing, but I will first paste in an old review I had done for Hammer Studio's version of Dracula aka Horror of Dracula. The review was written in 2004 for an informal online film discussion group, and going through this you would not think I liked the film as much as I do now. Here goes:

My only earlier experience of the Hammer horrors being the slow-paced and unrewarding Countess Dracula, I thought I would, before dismissing them entirely, give a try to their much praised (among the genre fans) first Dracula film. Well, it's a lot better than Countess Dracula, better paced with the thrills coming along fairly frequently but it remains in most part a clunky, garish effort that doesn't very well stand the test of time.

Jimmy Sangster's script is a very `free adaptation' of [Bram] Stoker's book, cheerfully fooling about with the characters and relationships (Lucy, engaged to Jonathan Harker, is the sister of Arthur Holmwood, who is married to Mina???) and doing away with major chunks of the original plot to fit Hammer's limited means. The film bears a lot of B-movie trademarks – stagey sets, cacophonous music, horrible dialog, and with few exceptions, prosaic visuals. Christopher Lee's Dracula is decent if not too effective in the scares department, and way ahead of his predecessor [Bela] Lugosi's stodgy turn.

The best parts of the movie though are the solid performances of Michael Gough as Arthur Holmwood and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. A word about Cushing: He plays Van Helsing more as a vampire hunting Sherlock Holmes and quite rightly since he has such a startling resemblance in his looks and gestures to the beloved sleuth - only the lack of a proper baritone puts him a couple paces behind Jeremy Brett. He and Gough gamely manage to imbue their roles with some dignity in the face of all the ridiculous lines they have to mouth. So in total, this movie won't having tearing your hair out over it but is also nowhere near the must-sees for the current-day horror fan.

Even then I had begun to have second thoughts, since just a few hours after the initial writeup I added a post-scriptum:

I feel that I may have come cross as being a bit too harsh on the film. To be sure, it would have had some powerful shock moments in it's time, when the only Dracula film to reference was the turgid 1931 Lugosi version. It's mainly that the shock value doesn't translate too well today, since it's not accompanied by a strong aesthetic. The sets are not bad in themselves but, unlike Mario Bava's Black Sunday, unimaginative lighting reveals their prop-like quality all too obviously. The performances in general would have made a much better impression if the actors hadn't had to grapple with mostly inept dialog. 

Well, given that nearly a decade later I still enjoy watching the film, enough to drop 18 quid on a blu-ray release, I guess I can shove the "doesn't very well stand the test of time" remark where it came from. Dracula is still not a frightening film unless you're extremely young or extremely simple-minded, but it is a rousing adventure with generous lashings of the sensational. My remarks about the turns by Lee and Michael Gough are also reversed in this span of time. Lee does the best he can with the material at hand (although his absolute lack of dialog after the initial scenes does dampen the impact of the character as anything more than ravening animal), and Gough seems to have a hard time finding a steady tone for his performance, some of his delivery almost amateur drama level.

But one of the big things this new home video release of Dracula based on a 2007 BFI restoration of the film (with some additional work to incorporate previously censored footage found only on a Japanese print) does is, make me reconsider my views on the technical merits and visual aesthetic of the film. Now I was not even born when the film was released in 1958 and have no grounds to speculate on how faithful the new look of the film is to the intentions of its makers. But to mine eye, the film now looks amazing, in a way that it can finally be taken seriously as a product of fine craft. The previous reference for me was the Warner DVD, where the brightness seemed uniform throughout the film and the level was so high it flattened the image, stripping it of visual drama and exposed the budgetary limitations. One of the major changes here is that the brightness and colors are carefully graded to correctly represent the time of day in the scenes. Just this simple act of cohering the script and the visuals instantly boosts the dramatic strength of the scenes. The new restoration is also not afraid of darkening the screen as necessary, even if it means obscuration of previously visible detail. Thus scenes like when Jonathan Harker invades the crypt in Dracula's castle near twilight in the hope of destroying the master look atmospheric instead of stagey. With the readjusted color timing, several scenes have an almost painterly quality to them. If true to the original look of the film, it reveals Terence Fisher to be a far more skilled and careful craftsman than I previously gave him credit for. While I will not say James Bernard's score is equally revelatory this time around,  the several Hammer films I have seen in the interim have made me more comfortable with his style and appreciative of the unique identifying stamp it brought to the studio's output.

So yes, I will gladly eat my erstwhile words regarding  this wonderfully entertaining film. A few additional words for those interested in the blu-ray (which also comes with DVD versions of the new restoration and sundry bonus features, so it's well worth your money even if you aren't yet on the high-def wagon):

Like I have described above, visually the presentation is quite lovely and beyond anything previously seen on home video. It is however soft in appearance, detail is decent but not eye-popping and print damage is still apparent in some scenes. There are however no digital anomalies, and it is unlikely that there will be any better presentation of the film in the near future. The dual-mono lossless audio track faithfully presents the original sound mix, which again means that it's a little on the hollow side, especially when the brass booms in background, but works as intended.

There's a good smattering of extras: A making of featuring interviews with several people including Jimmy Sangster, a documentary on the restoration process and the incorporation of the Japanese footage, and another on the censorship of the film in the UK. This is all good stuff. There is also a commentary track I have not yet sampled, which thankfully doesn't include Christopher Lee. What annoys me is that this premium priced package does not have even a liner note insert but a PDF booklet (which is located in the DVD containing bonus features, but not the blu-ray). It's a minor quibble, but considering that companies like Eureka offer significantly better packaging for their Masters of Cinema releases which incidentally are cheaper than this, it is annoying.

Sona Spa [dir. Makarand Deshpande]

Sometimes even a rough build of a fresh concept is better than the nth polished and honed iteration of a done-to-death theme. Writer-Director Makarand Deshpande's Dänav (reviewed on this site here), although rather unwieldy, half-finished and even tacky on occasion, was interesting to me because it told a fresh story with strong dramatic quotient. Hence my attraction to see his new offering Sona Spa, although I suspected that it would suffer from many of the same shortcomings that plagued Dänav. You could say I saw the film under rather personalized conditions: a very decent screening in a desolate cinema hall. It speaks for the amount of interest the lay public has in this star-bereft enterprise (unless you count Naseeruddin Shah, and we'll talk about that soon), but from a selfish point of view it makes for near-ideal conditions for appreciating a film of this sort.

So how does Sona Spa compare to its predecessor? For one it is technically a lot more polished, with even some stylish cinematography and editing touches thrown in. There are still rough edges: the writing and acting can be rather gauche, there is some cheap language and sexual references thrown in possibly to add market value to the film (that obviously didn't work) and the use of computer graphics generated imagery is miles behind what most other commercial film industries of the world use. But compared to Dänav which had absolutely no style, this is progress. Alas, technical progress seems to have come at the cost of conceptual freshness and dramatic intensity.

The basic idea behind the titular Sona Spa is that it is a place where you can pay to have your sleeping hours transplanted into someone else. Confused? In essence what this means is the person sleeping on your behalf will for that period receive your state of mind with all its cares and tensions and in return transfer their state of uninterrupted blissful rest to you. Do not bother to ask for even basal level rationality behind this concept as the film is not interested in doling out any explanations in that regard. Even the spa as such is a hugely incongruous establishment, with a complete lah-di-dah approach to running background checks on its customers, inexplicable financial circumstances and the sort of liberal employee policies for its “sleep-workers” that the rest of us can only (heh) dream of. Rucha (Shruti Vyas) and Ritu (Aahana Kumra) are two girls from filthy-rich and middle-class backgrounds respectively that take up employment as sleep-workers. Each comes with their own emotional baggage. Emotionally fractured spoiled brat Rucha is looking for a cure for her insomniac father, while humble affable Ritu wants to earn money for her (wait, is this another point of contrast?) comatose father's hospital expenses and help a sister struggling with a recurring nightmare. In turn they are set up with “clients” for whom they must sleep. The catch is that in the sleep-state they receive the dreams of their clients and these can take a turn into perverse sexual or violent territory.

This is an excellent concept in outline and I would have loved to see some daring strides taken. But there are problems with the manner in which the concept is dealt with here: Here, dreams have no randomness, no disorientation factor, they are presented in a manner as mundane as memories or flashbacks. It is as though the writer is afraid of confusing the audience, not a good sign. The second aspect is that after teasing with the perverse elements of the dreams, the story makes no effort to explore the acute and chronic effects that it can have on the minds of the sleep-workers. Instead, it rather quickly wraps the dream-cycle with trite moral lessons and happy endings. This is very unfortunate pussy-footing. A film like this was never going to garner a significant audience, it would have made more sense to just cast aside any notions of garnering popularity and make the best of the idea instead of watering it down. And yeah, somewhere in between is that all too abused symbol of unspoiled innocence, the retard.

I am perhaps being unreasoning if I say that you might still give this watch. I liked it more than the much slicker Inception, although that's possibly because that one had too much fan-hype surrounding it. I also feel good about a Hindi movie that's at least a novel idea and not just an ego massage for the Great Bollywood Incestuous Mafia. There are, if you can ignore the disappointments and the gauchery, moments where the film strikes a chord. Aahana Kumra as Ritu gives a very solid, empathetic performance, and like I earlier said, it is visually more polished. As for Naseer, while he features heavily in the posters and marketing, he is not even playing a role in the conventional sense. He portrays the Baba who has established the spa and within the film is only seen in televised ads proclaiming its benefits.

Dänav [dir. Makarand Deshpande]

In a prelude to my review of Makarand Deshpande's new film Sona Spa, I'm putting up a review of his 2003 film Dänav, I had earlier posted on a movie discussion group.

Earlier known as a character actor in films, Makarand Deshpande has been also quite active on the theatre front and Dänav, his maiden filmmaking stint, is an adaptation of his play Basant ka Teesra Yauvan (Third Youth of Spring...?). The film had gained some hype on account of its planned inclusion the Cannes festival Director's section (whatever it's called), which didn't happen because of some technical glitches.

The story takes on the style of the classical Indian plays, similar to stuff Girish Karnad has done:
Raja Sahab (Sayaji Shinde), a royalty figure who believes himself to be a divine authority, defies the mores of his time to acquire a 7-year old girl whom he intends to have as his mistress once she is grown up. Obsessed with his new possession, Raja Sahab gives her an orchard, a gift that is also her prison. Christened Laxmi (Sonali Kulkarni), the girl grows up in all innocence, protected from the gaze of any other man; even the orchard laborers must go blind-folded, and those who defy have their eyes gouged out. Laxmi is enchanted by Raja Sahab's indulgence towards her and freely gives of herself to his desires. Things move in this vein until, in another bid to win her, Raja Sahab brings in a circus for her pleasure.

As word of the circus spreads, the air filled with curiosity about the star attraction, Dänav (Beast-Man), who has the strength to grapple with elephants. Laxmi too is excited about going to see Dänav but her wish is frustrated by Raja Sahab, who, after a preview, decides against her going to the circus. Raja Sahab nurses an inferiority complex over Dänav's strength and fears that Laxmi will be swayed. But Laxmi is already distraught over her wish not being satisfied and Raja Sahab gives in, buying the animal-like Dänav as a slave for the orchard. Laxmi is initially frightened by Dänav's ferocity but slowly develops a bond and without any notion of infidelity towards Raja Sahab shares her body and mind with Dänav. Raja Sahab on the other hand, locks himself in the temple mulling over his generosity towards Laxmi. In course Dänav reveals that he is actually a proper man, Narayan, whose inadvertent killing of a cow forced him into exile in the jungle. When Laxmi fears his brute force, he says that he will sacrifice his strength for her love. Subsequent events lead to a climax of violence and tragedy.

The strong non-hackneyed plot is the main reason to sit through what is a rather unpolished product. Deshpande proves himself to be an adept writer, furnishing potent moral dilemmas for his mostly well-etched characters, and has an interesting blend of ancient and contemporary tradition. Sonali Kulkarni as Laxmi puts up a very credible performance in a difficult role, the best in the film. Now for the caveats: The execution has a lot of unevenness. The main flaw comes in the selection of Sayaji Shinde as Raja Sahab. Shinde, like Sadashiv Amrapurkar, suffers from a limited range and Raja Sahab, who is actually a very interesting gray-shaded character, comes off uncomfortably close to the psychotic villain stereotype Shinde has portrayed in scores of earlier films. Aryan Vaid as Dänav was IMO okay, although his character was more limited. His attempt to have a beast-like shambling gait for Dänav doesn't come off too well, being more in a stiff robotic vein. Deshpande's lack of cinematic flair is unfortunately quite evident in the slipshod technical values for the film; many parts of it look downright tacky. Vishal Bharadwaj's background score has its moments of interest.

In the end, I find this a very welcome and interesting new effort, although it could have done with a LOT more polish to fully realize its worth. A significant portion of the crowd that watched this film (at the Asian Film Festival in 2004) might likely disagree with this review, since they appeared to derive a lot of unintentional humor from the film. Well, to each his own.

The New World [dir. Terence Malick]

There is nobody to beat Terence Malick from a visuals standpoint, his films have the most outstanding natural (meaning not generated or manipulated using computers) visuals of all time. The Thin Red Line is a film I return to time and again for its brilliant depiction of the meaninglessness of war, and while I have never re-watched it, The Tree of Life just blew me away when I saw it at the cinema. The extended cut of The New World is sadly not in that category.

The film is a largely fictional account of significant historical events in the early colonization of America by the English, mainly the role of the native American tribal princess Pocahontas, who is famous for having saved the life of an Englishman from her own father and after being held as hostage by English forces, went to England and converted to Christianity, forsaking her native heritage. The film adopts the line that Pocahontas saved the Englishman, Captain John Smith, because she was in love with him. This love causes her to support the stranded colonists, even if it meant betraying her own father and causing a battle that led to heavy casualties on both sides. What happens after that and how Pocahontas ends up in Britain and becomes Rebecca forms the rest of the narrative. In this case narrative is a very loose term, because Malick's films rarely have very cohesive plots or tight drama. We get the usual assortment of gorgeous images and new-age existential monologues. The trouble is, I never found it particularly engaging on an emotional level. Given the nearly 3 hour running time of this extended cut (which is not the director's cut. There doesn't seem to be a definitive DC for this film at least as of now. There was the 150 min early release cut to make it in time for Oscars submission, the 135 min nationwide release cut, and then this 175 min extended cut which may or may not have had Malick's involvement) that translated to a whole lot of looking at the watch and wondering when things would move forward. There are elements to be appreciated. Q'orianka Kilcher is tailor-made for the child-woman archetype Malick has envisioned for Pocahontas. She is a natural beauty and effectively handles whatever heavy-duty drama she gets. The film makes some ironic observations about the savagery amongst the early English colonists contrasted with the "In harmony with nature" Indians, although one feels this could also be made-up to fit in with Malick's woolly-headed worldview.

On the whole The New World is really more pretty postcard than emotional journey for me.

Royal Bengal Rahasya [dir. Sandip Ray]

Bengalis and in general fans of Indian mystery / adventure stories will be aware of the famous detective character Feluda (1965-92), created by Satyajit Ray. Written primarily for children / teens, the Feluda tales are inspired by the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Tintin. Many of these adventures take place in different parts of the country, thereby also providing a bit of a travelogue and general knowledge within the narrative. My first brush with Feluda was when as part of the Satyajit Ray Presents series on DD, they had a multi-episode Feluda adventure called Kissa Kathmandu Ka, of which I mainly recall Shashi Kapoor in the lead role and Utpal Dutt as Feluda's arch-nemesis, Maganlal Meghraj.

Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to come across an English translation of the complete Feluda stories in 2 volumes published by Penguin. I was soon sucked into the world of Feluda, his constant companions Topshe and Jotayu, his love for Charminar cigarettes and twisted conundrums. While the stories are not very brilliant in terms of their construction of mystery (the second volume of the Penguin series in particular had some rather sloppy ones), they are brisk-paced and fun boys' adventures, with interesting nuggets of information about various Indian places and customs. Also, since they are written with younger audiences in mind, they eschew the more sordid elements of other detective franchises, making for a nice palate cleanser between other genres. Hooked by these I also got hold of two Feluda film adaptations directed by Satyajit Ray himself - Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) and Jai Baba Felunath (Victory to The Elephant God, also a play on Feluda's name). It was interesting to see that Ray's shooting scripts, especially for Sonar Kella, deviated significantly from the way the plot is unfolded in the source story, presenting it in a more cinematic way and keeping the proceedings fresh even for fans familiar with it. I'm a sucker for sleuth films and TV series and both these films were entertaining.

RBR is part of a newer series of Feluda films, directed by Satyajit's son Sandip Ray (who also directed episodes of the Satyajit Ray Presents series). Sandip has had a very checkered career and the burden of living up to his ancestors' legacies must be weighing heavily upon him. While I have fond childhood memories of his TV series, it appears that he has not made a distinct name for himself as a film director. Sometime in the 2000's, he began his updated Feluda series with Sabyasachi Chakraborty as the detective. While the general perception of these films has been that they are not in the same league as Satyajit's own films, they were still popular and of these, RBR appears to have a higher degree of approval from those that can compare the different Feluda versions. Hence it is my first entry in to the updated series.

In the story, Feluda and his companions are invited by the famed hunter Mahitosh Singha-Roy to his house in the forest bordering Bhutan to solve a mystery in the form of an old family riddle possibly leading to a treasure (Musgrave Ritual, anyone?). But hardly has Feluda settled in than Mahitosh's private secretary is found to have been killed in the forest at night. Feluda must now unravel the riddle as well as find which of several possible suspects may be responsible for the secretary's death. The jungle setting of the film allows it to eschew modern amenities like mobile phones and the internet, bringing the style more in line with the period of the original stories (Amusingly enough, even letters are written and not typed, the excuse given that the computer does not support Bengali script). The screenplay and dialog stick scrupulously close to the events and chronology of the tale, almost to the point of not having any originality in themselves. Perhaps, Sandip is too wary of fans that will decry any liberties taken with the source. To his credit, the proceedings remain brisk and interesting so long as you know what to expect in a Feluda narrative. Sabyasachi does a fine job in the lead, although my favorite is still the previous Feluda, Soumitra Chatterjee. In my mind Soumitra better embodies the amateur detective aspect while Sabyasachi looks more hardened and professional. One definite letdown is Bibhu Bhattacharya as Jotayu. Of course, anyone that has seen comic actor Santosh Dutta portraying Jotayu in the Satyajit Ray films can never picture another actor in the role, but Bhattacharya's performance is wholly forgettable, which is a big minus for the character. The other supporting actors fulfill their parts well and the technical aspects of the film are decent, with some nice jungle photography. The use of certain computer graphics is hit-and-miss but acceptable enough in the context of the film. On the whole this is a very decent Feluda adaptation, perhaps a little too faithful to the source, but well executed and easy to sit through...maybe even more than once.

The DVD by Sangeet India network actually features pretty good video, better than I have seen for several recent Hindi movies. Colors are natural and stable and the image has decent texture. The main flaw is a prominent orange logo near the top left of the screen, which unfortunately is present throughout the film. Sound is alright too. There's a bonus disc with extras, which I have yet to go through.