Saturday, April 26, 2014
Samrat & Co.
Almost Elementary
Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective Sherlock
Holmes is rediscovered by TV series and filmmaker fans every few years and each
new work starring Holmes and his sidekick Watson, has the maker’s own stamp on
it. Robert Downey Jr. Benedict
Cumberbatch, Johnny Lee Miller have all played Holmes in recent times with
varying degrees of cool.
Kaushik Ghatak hat-tips Holmes in the credits
and then goes on to make Samrat & Co.,
which is more a parody than a tribute.
The good-looking Rajeev Khandelwal plays
Samrat Tilak Dhari, with the unfortunate initials STD; his assistant/companion
is Chakra Dhar or CD, an annoying anchor of TV crime shows. A young woman, Dimpy (Madalsa Sharma)
approaches him for help. Her father
Mahendra Pratap’s (Girish Karnad) Shimla Estate has had some strange goings-on
and she wants STD to investigate.
In the huge Shimla mansion, there is the
usual assortment of family members, friends and employees who provide the list
of suspects and red herrings when Mahendra Pratap is murdered. Before that, there is a giggle-inducing scene
in which he shows off Shakespeare’s feather quill to Samrat. This astonishing prop then never reappears.
Ghatak slavishly uses the detective story
format perfected by Doyle, Agatha Christie and other writers of classic crime
fiction. As a result, even though the film is set in the present, it looks and
sounds antiquated. Everything is tacky, from the over-stuffed sets to the
costumes (Dimpy, for instance, is dressed in outmoded frocks, when everybody
else is bundled up in winter wear.)
As Samrat investigates, more corpses turn up,
which just ups the boredom quotient of the film. Khandelwal has tremendous
screen presence (you try not to notice his frequent hair style changes) and
could have made for a fine private eye in a better film—this one does not even
reach the entertainment value of TV’s CID.
The way the film ends, it looks like there are plans for a sequel. This sort of thing just might work as a TV
series, a film needs much more imagination... and novelty. Otherwise, to use a
Samrat-ism: what’s the point?
Labels: Cinemaah
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