Bulbbul

The film is essentially be a re-imagination of the legend of chudail (witch) with the twisted feet as a devi with a cause and a mission but I was swept away by the overwhelming romance — unexpressed but implicit, fulsome in its tacitness. Like a simple conversation towards the end of the film, between Bulbbul and Sudip, over a shared bidi (cigarette). The oblique talk of hope, boundaries and the unreachable between them even as their eyes stay transfixed on the other. The gaze of love, or something like that. “ Kahani poori kaise hogi ,” weeps Bulbbul at one point in the film. No, some love stories don’t ever come a full circle to a conclusion. And that makes them all the more beautiful.

Dutt uses the ancient trope of a bloodthirsty ‘chudail with ultey pair’, a familiar creature tale in our scary ‘kisse-kahaani’, to create dread and fear. The writing is skilful and stays on point, and the performances are all solid: Bose in the twin roles of the suspicious ‘thakur moshai’, as well as the man trapped in his damaged mind, Tiwary as the ‘devar’ who is a constant companion to his as-young-as-himself lovely bhabhi, Chatterjee as the ‘doctor babu’ who has a soft spot for the ‘badi bahu’. Dam is effective as the let-down ‘choti bahu’ who wreaks damage. And as the little girl who grows into a woman, her enigmatic smile hiding the pain which she harnesses to great effect, the doe-eyed Dimri is terrific.

The trauma that Bulbbul undergoes leaves an indelible mark on her and poignant scenes reveal a telling tale. In one particular scene after a very violent episode, Binodini comes in to pacify Bulbbul but what she in turn does is regurgitate what probably she herself was told when faced with a similar dilemma. It’s a striking scene where we see the perpetrator as also a victim and realise there are no clear demarcations. But Dutt’s screenplay remains placid. We know what is to follow, there are hardly any surprises in store and the narrative remains devoid of exciting plot twists. But it’s the way the film is crafted that one finds it difficult to abandon it. Rahul Bose , Parambrata Chatterjee, Avinash Tiwary and Paoli Dam give their characters a credible potency.