Debaloy Bhattacharya Breaks the Detective

At the heart of Debaloy Bhattacharya’s bold new show lies the question: "What good can a detective do in a world so screwed?”

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD]

I am not an avid viewer of television or web shows, never was. Yet, I decided, in 2021, to include minishows on my list of the year’s favourites; a decision made after watching a couple of minishows, both made for Hoichoi: “Mandaar” by Anirban Bhattacharya and “Boli” by Sankha Dasgupta. I thought it would be a disservice to the artists behind them to not give them their due—a place amongst the best filmmakers to have worked that year. Those shows had some of the finest filmmaking and most original ideas I’d seen all year which made them truly “cinematic.” I was reminded, at that moment, of Cahiers du Cinéma hailing David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” as the best film of not just that year but also the decade. Minishows—even longer ones with two or three seasons—can, in fact, be cinematic. At their best, they are an opportunity for filmmakers to make one very long movie, and many short ones, at the same time. In case of longer shows with multiple seasons, the later seasons might be considered sequels to the first. Imagine “The Godfather” getting made today—I’m sure no major Hollywood studio would fund a three-hour-long movie; it’d be a streaming or television network hiring a director to adapt the novel into a minishow, which would then get a new season owing to its success or hint towards one in its ending.

 

2023 has been a great year for webshows, which is why I have more of them on my list. Amazon Prime Video had a couple of great releases this year; both of them find a place in my list and both have to do with movies: “Jubilee,” Vikramaditya Motwane’s à clef work defined by grandeur, about the early days of the Bombay Film Industry and “Cinema Marte Dum Tak,” spearheaded by Vasan Bala, a rather generic yet significant mini docushow about the world of lowbrow erotic B movies. A couple of such great shows came out of Bengal this year too, like Nirjhar Mitra’s “Shikarpur,” a detective thriller unlike any other, a thorough deconstruction and subversion of the genre. The best of all came from Debaloy Bhattacharya—his minishow adaptation of Kallol Lahiri’s superb novel “Indubala Bhaater Hotel,” for Hoichoi, a show so cinematic, so magnificent a portrait of not just a character but also a piece of land that I hailed it as the best movie of the year (till I recently saw “Killers of the Flower Moon”).

 

Bhattacharya is back with another show, for Amazon this time, the neo-noir “P.I. Meena.” So far, the “plots” of Bhattacharya’s work could always be written off in a couple of sentences. “P.I. Meena” is different; it’s the most happening of his works. The staging is elaborate and the action is frenetic—Bhattacharya spends much of his time setting it all up. Tanya Maniktala plays Meenakshi “Meena” Iyer, a private detective working at Sundial Securities, a private investigation firm in Kolkata, where the action begins when Meena witnesses a freak accident on the road—a truck hit-and-running over a young man, Partho Pratim Dey (Sawon Chakraborty)—and takes it upon herself to bring him to the hospital. At the police station, where she is summoned to record her statement, she meets his mother, Chandana Dey (Zarina Wahab). Chandana, on knowing her profession, tells her it could’ve been an attempt to murder Partho and requests her to find the conspirator(s). After Partho’s death, Meena takes up the case, which spirals into a rabbithole of conspiracies involving dubious cops, virologists, Central Intelligence officers, bioterrorists, and politicians.

 

There’s a lot more—including Meena’s troubled past and inner life; her relationship with her comatose brother, Joy; his girlfriend, Annie; her boss, Pritam Sen; a “fraud lawyer” with an opportunistic interest in politics and obsession with the dark net, Subho Roy, who is also desperately pursuing Meena; a virologist and doctor with his secrets, Andrew Rawkhaw. It’s a web of plots, subplots, and characters that Bhattacharya unravels evocatively as the show progresses.

 

The show was not written by Bhattacharya but by his longtime collaborator, Arindam Mitra. Both Mitra and Bhattacharya worked on Anurag Kashyap’s watershed film “Black Friday” in some capacity. Mitra was the producer and pitched Kashyap the idea to work on the ’93 Bombay Blasts, and Bhattacharya worked on the film’s promotional material. They collaborated again in 2006 on Mitra’s directorial, “Shoonya” (which remains unreleased to date) which Bhattacharya edited. “P.I. Meena” is their third collaboration where Bhattacharya is the director while Mitra serves as the show’s creator and co-writer, along with Ronak Kamat and the actor Vipin Sharma (who’s also starring in the show).

“P.I. Meena” does resemble “Black Friday”—it’s brimming with almost as many characters and events, and travels around as much within the city and outside. The investigation takes her to the remote North East Indian town of Littnong, where she meets Rawkhaw (Jisshu Sengupta), who’s the sole doctor available at the local hospital yet helped contain the outbreak of a vicious new virus. In no time, the virus hits Kolkata, leading to an emergency. After certain revelations, the question arises whether or not this virus is a bioweapon.

 

Such details would be sufficient to make a great crime drama, but “P.I. Meena,” like all of Bhattacharya’s previous works, is a great many things at once. It’s no generic detective thriller—the nature of Meena’s job makes it very clear. She resembles a white-collar corporate jobber more than the venturous freelancer sleuth we know. She has to file her expenses, beg for her salary, tolerate Pritam’s pestering and Subho’s pursuits, and ask Adi—perhaps her most considerate colleague—to cover for her while she’s away. It’s safe to say that “P.I. Meena” is a postmodernist work, like Bhattacharya’s “Biday Byomkesh,” which strays away from and subverts all tropes and conventions of its genre. “Biday Byomkesh” subverted the myth of Byomkesh by portraying him as a frail, old man dwelling in darkness. His career dealing with criminals and the dark side of human nature had taken a toll on him, and so did the passing of his beloved wife and friend. The vicissitudes in “P.I. Meena” have real consequences for Meena and affect her terribly, as a result of which, within the span of the show, she visibly oldens.

 

Tanya Maniktala delivers one of the most distinctive and expressive performances in Indian cinema this year. She is explosive and impulsive; her performance is internalized and agonized. It’s stunning how much she is capable of doing with just her large, expressive eyes. Bhattacharya seems to recognize the strength of her eyes and often captures them in close-ups. In these close-ups, Meena’s inner life seems to burst forth on our screens. The eyes express her aspirations, longing, curiosity, anguish, and, above all, innocence. There’s a naivete to Meena—she believes her actions will make a difference, which, as it turns out, couldn’t be less true. She doesn’t seem to realize how everyone involved seems questionable and hides information from her. A shocking revelation soon makes the whole investigation seem futile, and in the climax, her world is turned upside down by the implications of her self-admittedly reckless actions. It’s the journey of this harrowing realization that also makes “P.I. Meena” a terrific coming-of-age story. Not to mention, Maniktala is mesmerizing to look at; the power of her beauty and resilience is made text in the show as a character proclaims, “. . . there’s something about that girl that makes you do things.” Her true joyous, bubbly nature is visible in her appearance but her performance conveys the weight of her traumas and discontent.

 

“P.I. Meena” is not solely Bhattacharya’s work; chances are, he was brought in by either Mitra or Amazon to direct this project. Which is why, I think, it lacks some of Bhattacharya’s key traits, primarily his way of working with music and images. His key stylistic invention that attracted me to his work is the one where his images foray into music which foray into images, elevating the mood and heightening the melodrama. It creates an effect that is—for the lack of a better word—almost sexual; essentially, it’s an intercourse of images and sounds. 

 

In spite of the absence of his most distinctive stylistic creation, his command over the mood of each scene remains unwavering. One of my favourite moments in the show appears at twenty-five minutes into the third episode, right at the heart of the show—it takes place in a bar in Littnong where Meena and Rawkhaw meet for some discussion. The tone of their conversation changes midway, as Meena and Rawkhaw strike a chord, so does a guitarist at the bar, literally. The mood created by the lighting, the music, and the performances seems romantic; the song on the soundtrack—Amit Chatterjee’s “Tu Nehi”—is a love song about longing. A quiet romance brews between them, evident in their voices and glances, yet it remains subtextual. It explains why Meena desperately attempts to contact Rawkhaw as he becomes unresponsive, why Rawkhaw is concerned about her returning to Littnong, and why the scene where they meet again, at last, is staged like a reunion of estranged lovers. It makes Rawkhaw’s death in a crossfire all the more tragic. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Meena and Rawkhaw’s interactions would remain mere exchanges between sleuth and suspect (unless made explicit otherwise in the text itself), but Bhattacharya turns “P.I. Meena” into a tragic romance between two troubled souls who never meet.

 

There’s no dearth of such sumptuous moments in the show, yet I can’t help but wonder how it’d turn out had Bhattacharya had carte blanche. Regardless, he retains all that is great about all his works: his eye for patterns, rhythms, poetry, and music in scripts is so discerning that he need not write one to conjure them in a project he’s directing. He retains his way with images and montage—working with Indranath Marick, with whom he collaborated on “Dracula Sir,” who infuses his images with textures by way of his lighting—often multiple colours and tones in single shots, as if visually manifesting the characters’ various emotions, thoughts, and personas, functional at the same time—and Sourabh Prabhudesai, who infuses the boring web standard shot-counter shot coverage with rhythm intrinsic to Bhattacharya’s style.

 

The question arising from the news of Bhattacharya directing a show not written by him was how it’d fit into his oeuvre. After watching the show, I have my answer. “P.I. Meena” is utterly continuous with his narrative and stylistic interests. Like everything he’s done up till now, it transcends itself and takes a multifaceted form: Like “Biday Byomkesh,” it is a postmodern take on the detective, like “Dracula Sir,” it’s a tale of unrequited, even unsaid love, like “Indubala Bhaater Hotel,” it’s a stellar coming-of-age story. But it’s perhaps closest to “Biday Byomkesh,” a film that begged the question, “How does a lifetime of dealing with crime, and loss of those closest to him, affect a detective?” Similarly, “P.I. Meena” begs the question, “What good can a detective do in a world so screwed, so full of opportunism, lies and deceit?

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