Bengali Movie Bonkubabu 2014 (Bengali Flim Review)

 Bonkubabu

Cast: Saswata Chatterjee, Rajatava Dutta, Laboni Sarkar, Arunima Ghosh, Arjun Chakrabarty, Rupa Bhattacharjee

Direction: Anindya Bikas Datta

One thing that you realize watching Bonkubabu is that comedy is not everyone's cup of tea. Bengali cinema has a long line-up of classic comic films — Basanta Bilap, Sriman Prithviraj and even the recent Bhooter Bhabishyat — but Anindya Bikas Datta's debut venture is definitely not one of them.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the casting of SaswataChatterjee, an actor who's in his '40s, as the 70-year-old Bonkubabu. Yes, Saswata is one of Tollywood's best and he has proved time and again that he can pull any role off. But sporting shoddy make-up — you can clearly see his false jawline — as Bonkubabu, he does nothing extra that a septagenarian actor can't. He's good overall as a bad-tempered old man with a heart of gold, but in a film that is a collage of crude jokes and a feeble storyline, his old-man act loses steam.

The plot of joint families breaking up and land sharks targeting the ancestral property has been explored in many films. It could have still been an entertaining watch had the film not gone overboard with sexual innuendo, slapstick humour and an overlong running time. Post interval, the film picks up pace. The credit goes partly to Debranjan Nag, who is excellent as a bookie-turned-villainous promoter, and to SumitSamaddar, who plays a thief. RajatavaDutta as Bonkubabu's eldest son, the meek Babushona, is worth watching. But Arjun Chakrabarty, otherwise a good actor, looks too young and naive as the sex-starved newly-married man. The song Tultuli, featuring him and on-screen wife Arunima, does not bring any laughs. However, the action sequence, where every member of Bonku's family tries to beat up the baddies, generates a few laughs.

Not everybody can be successful trying to mix comedy and romance with a dose of social commentary. The director loses focus while trying to do too many things simultaneously. He looks inspired by Priyadarshan's style of filmmaking but to get there, there is a long road ahead of him.