Film: "TE3N" Director: Ribhu Dasgupta Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vidya Balan, Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Padmavati Rao, Prakash Belawadi |
Ribhu Dasgupta really wants you to care about John Biswas (Amitabh Bachchan). He opens with Biswas at a police station, making space for two felons on the bench. He's uncomfortable but that's due to age and weariness. He is also impatient but you get that this is not the first time he is doing this.
Dasgupta doesn't leave it there but follows Biswas as he drives home on his scooter -- a rickety machine with a questionable spark plug -- and then doing all the chores from cooking to fixing the fan to the laundry, all decorated by Bachchan's practised gait.
Biswas has a functional spark plug though, for one reason: his granddaughter’s kidnapping and death eight years ago that he is still trying to solve.
Te3n is an official remake of the South Korean movie Montage, which I have not seen. Te3n wants to be a whodunit for the most part but it also has other significantly different strands.
The case from eight years ago remains incomplete, leaving one man emotionally broken and another professionally compromised.
The one keeps at it the same way he keeps kick-starting his scooter while the other -- Nawazuddin Siddiqui as former cop Martin -- turns to God. But something keeps gnawing at Martin -- either his hunger that was never satiated or the guilt that he talks about when he visits Biswas’s home -- and he keeps returning to the case.
Dasgupta overdoes the pitiable state of Biswas and his wheelchair-bound wife like he overdoes many other things in the film.
This is the only angle used to make us care for Biswas’s plight but that’s not enough. There is the exposition. Several scenes are repeated for our benefit. The grandaughter's name is Angela. While that is good enough for us, we are lectured why she was given that name.
There is also a strange case of withholding information, which reduces the film to an idiot plot. Dasgupta follows two investigations, the one man army of John Biswas and the other with Sarita (Vidya Balan) and Martin investigating a curiously similar kidnapping case. But he is also too opaque with his timeline. The police part of the investigation is an absolute sham.
A trigger-happy Sarita and sceptical Martin are at odds with each other even as the number of police officers looking for the kidnapped kid tends towards zero.
Dasgupta is also no Reema Kagti in that he cannot dredge up atmosphere that would have made a big difference in this story.
His Kolkata is colourless but with character and forever forlorn - Durga Puja and Christmas notwithstanding.
That is mirrored in the roles of Bachchan and Siddiqui, both of them reliable but never rising above the material. Neither does Dasgupta.