Celebrated Bengali director’s Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Hindi-language production Anwar Ka Ajab Kissa was completed in 2013 but has been unrel...
Celebrated Bengali director’s Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Hindi-language production Anwar Ka Ajab Kissa was completed in 2013 but has been unreleased – until now. The whimsical tale centring on a detective has finally found an outlet on the streaming platform Eros Now. The 126-minute movie’s vintage shows up in several sequences. For instance, as Anwar follows his targets around, he uses a small but conspicuous digital camera.
Nostalgia emerges in other ways in the seriocomic narrative. The film plays out in a labyrinthine quarter of Kolkata and in the mind of its quirky hero. Anwar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) has a tendency to get a bit too involved with his cases. He gets moralistic when he catches a client’s son fooling around but is empathetic when another mark turns out be a deeply closeted man. He yearns for his lost love and has deep one-sided conversations with his aging Labrador Lalu (played by the good boy Robin).
Anwar isn’t exactly discreet – he walks around in an ostentatious hat and coat – but then he isn’t exactly a classic sleuth either. His investigations are a way of retracing his steps back to his childhood and making sense of his memories, the nature of relationships and human foibles. Among the people...
