The day the trailer of Bioscopewala dropped, a battle raged in a WhatsApp group of childhood friends. Many of my friends hailed from Bengal, and one of them shared the video, questioning whether a timeless tale like Kabuliwala should ever be distorted. In any case, the film was too small, too low on buzz, to have really got the attention from a not-so-film-crazy bunch. The trigger, perhaps, was the fact that Bengalis hold their literature too close to hearts; Bioscopewala is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s 1892 short story. A contemporary take on it, quite evident in the trailer, seemed like a warped idea.
Tagore's story is a simple tale of unconditional love and longing. Five-year-old Minnie befriends a Pashtun dryfruit merchant, Rahmat, before he gets implicated in a police case and is arrested. Kabuliwala, as she addresses him, is in Kolkata to earn a livelihood. He has left his family behind in Afghanistan. In young Minnie, he sees his own daughter that he left back home. Years later, after release from the prison, he comes back to find Minnie getting married.
First time director, Deb Medhekar’s Bioscopewala is an extrapolation of Tagore's Kabuliwala. It extends the story from where the original ends. The Afghan merchant, Rahmat (Daany Denzongpa), in this movie, survives by displaying films on his bioscope. He lost a theatre in his homeland to the ravages of Taliban and the the civil war. Rahmat flees to Bengal, and, as in the original, gets close to the five-year-old Minnie (Miraya Suri)—daughter of a photographer Robi Basu (Adil Husain).
The debate on whether to rework classics is one that can continue till the end of time. The conversation on my WhatsApp group perked my interest, but before it could peak, what struck me was the twist given to the lead two lead characters.
In Bioscopewala, the flight of imagination soars. It opens in the present time where Minnie Basu (Geetanjali Thapa) flies back from her film course in France and tries to reconnect with her childhood memories after her father’s untimely death in a plane crash. She is reminded of the man who showed her films, who has, as fate would have it, ended up in her Kolkata home with Alzheimers. Denzongpa is fantastic in his portrayal of the Afghan merchant. The character goes through many a transformation in this 91-minute film, and each of those looks and mental state are really convincing.
However, it is Thapa who has the most prominent role to play. She is struck-down by the new developments, is emotional beyond words, and she plays that part so well that you almost feel what she is feeling. After unravelling his past by tracking down various people from the time Rahmat came to India, she wants to reunite the bioscopewala with his daughter in war-torn Afghanistan. She takes the journey head-on to search for her in the troubled country.
This is not the first-time Thapa, in her reel life, puts every breath to track someone down. In her first release, I.D., she in search of a house painter's family after he collapsed and eventually died while working in her house. She travels across the length and breadth of Mumbai to do that. In Liar's Dice that got her the National Award, she travels from Nainital to Delhi in search of her husband who had gone incommunicado. It can't be just coincidence that Thapa ends up with role of a woman whose mission is to track people down. But, not once do you feel that she may have done anything similar previously. The range of emotions on her face while she struggles with varied emotions is something that can give you goosebumps.
With deft direction and pointed cinematography, it brings out the best in a story that was conceptualised by Sunil Doshi, and written by Medhekar and Radhika Anand. And, as the film clarifies in the beginning, it’s not an adaptation of the classic, just a film inspired by those timeless characters. At that, it’s moving and an interesting spin-off that never dilutes the emotional quotient of the original story.
Film: Bioscopewala
Actors: Danny Denzongpa, Geetanjali Thapa, Adil Husain, Brijendra Kala
Director: Deb Medhekar
Rating: 4/5