Only a fleeting moment in Sam Hargrave’s Extraction appears true to the Netflix film’s Bangladesh setting: longtime Dhaka resident and mer...
Only a fleeting moment in Sam Hargrave’s Extraction appears true to the Netflix film’s Bangladesh setting: longtime Dhaka resident and mercenary Gaspar (David Harbour) enjoying a Bangladeshi hip-hop song in his car. The song, Cypher Bangla 2K16, heard again in the end credits, is the film’s only Bangladeshi and Bengali-language song.
As an example of the makers’ callousness, which isn’t restricted to representing Bangladesh’s capital as a city run by a drug baron who has the police and the army in his pockets, this song is subtitled as a “Hindi rap song”. Just as Dhaka is no different from the source graphic novel’s Paraguayan setting of Ciudad del Este, Bengali appears to be the same as Hindi.
Bangladesh has a rich history and culture of non-film independent music, particularly rock, which is rooted in the country’s freedom struggle. Through the 1970s and ’80s, rock, blues, metal and their related genres took over Bangladesh’s pop music scene before peaking in popularity in the ’90s.
It’s a shame when Dhaka’s denizens in Extraction are shown listening to Bollywood tunes, when there’s a wealth of Bangladeshi music that the makers could have tapped into. Here’s a sample of 10 songs, spanning rock, metal, folk-fusion, hip-hop, and electronic...
