Audience Keeping Fingers Crossed for Bidaay Byomkesh

Kolkata: The audience in Bengal is keeping its fingers crossed over SVF’s announcement of a film featuring an aged Byomkesh Bakshi, one of the most popular detectives in Bengali literature. The film, titled Bidaay Byomkesh, will be directed by Debaloy Bhattacharya.

“Too many experiments are being carried out with Byomkesh,” said 38-year old marketing professional Aditya Dasgupta. “We already had an older Byomkesh in Shajarur Kanta, which was a disaster,” he added.

Shajarur Kanta, based on the novel of the same name by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, had veteran actor Dhritiman Chatterjee in the role of Byomkesh. Konkona Sen Sharma, Pradip Mukherjee and Indraneil Sengupta played major roles in the film directed by Saibal Mitra.

Taming the Byomkesh Bakshi Overkill?

According to Bhattacharya, in Bidaay Byomkesh, the detective passes on the baton to his grandson Satyaki Bakshi who goes on to solve a crime.

“There has been an overdose of Byomkesh films in recent years. Thriller films are performing well in the box office and production houses are cashing on it,” said university student Debosmita Ganguly. “I do not pin much hope on this new aged Byomkesh film and prefer the ‘normal’ one,” she said.

Bidaay Byomkesh features Abir Chatterjee and Sohini Sarkar. It is likely to release in 2019.

Abir, meanwhile, will reprise his role as the sleuth in Arindam Sil’s Byomkesh Gotro which is slated for a Puja release this year. It is based on the story Rokter Daag.

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But not everybody is circumspect about the film.

Retired banker Utpal Kundu said, “It is like taking the Byomkesh franchise forward with a new story. There is no harm in trying out something new.”

He, however, warned that the director has to keep in mind the Bengali sentiment regarding Byomkesh.