“Do I really want to spend more time writing about this? Isn’t it enough that I’ve already spent more than 4 hours and hundreds of rupees on the trip to the theater?” These are questions I ask myself often. And it’s no surprise that they came to me to bengali bhooth. But I have managed to resist giving in to “No.” until now. And I’ll try again today. In the meantime, you can avoid spending time reading this one because “Yes, it’s that unbearable.”
We have to yield to the axiom that intelligent black magicians do not follow simple logic.
Akshay Kumar is terribly over-the-top: in volume, in expression, in body language. So much so that the other dominantly strident actors drown in his presence. And it’s not that anything meaningful or entertaining is being said or seen.
Slapstick is, of course, the staple of any Priyadarshan film that claims to be a comedy. You name it and you’ll see it: people tripping and falling, people slapping each other in such a way that the slap goes around in circles, hygiene humor, innuendos, all under the pretext of being a riot of laughs. Although I don’t understand it. Why do characters who mock and disapprove of the objectification of women need you to objectify them? Aiming to make you laugh and laugh, that too!
But that would require the writing team to be imaginative. And the creativity began and ended with naming a movie centered on a haunted palace,”bengali bhooth“And in case you’re wondering, no, the larger story is nothing more than people not believing in the haunted nature of the house and abandoning that notion. With all the scares, you see.
The nested story of why the spirits have adapted to this specific house is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that needn’t have been that way. There was so much meat to that story and such lovely complexity. But half of it is simply narrated from one character to another rather than shown. And the half shown looks like a cartoon comic strip.
So with that, I have little interest left in asking questions like: “Why does the “reverse” option exist?” It’s one thing to accept the fantastical of a fantasy world. But it is quite another to give in to the axiom that intelligent black magicians do not follow simple logic.
Speaking of logic, I am grappling with the truth that the Priyadarshan-Akshay-Kumar “comedy” genre exists and continues to exist. Hmm…
– Meeta, a part of the audience.
