Few good moves in this Teen patti!
Teen
Director: Ribhu Dasgupta
Actors: Amitabh Bachchan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Rating: 3/5
Defeated, dusty, slightly beat-up, bulging around the waist, still exuding a certain old-world charm—Amitabh Bachchan in this film looks a lot like Calcutta, the city his character is in.
If anything, you fall for the lead actor in almost the same way as you do for Cal, which is actively competing for first billing in this movie anyway.
The camera takes you through some stunningly desolate and decrepit locations as you explore the lanes and godowns and church and imambara and old offices with rickety metallic lifts and wire meshes sticking out in the former British Indian capital. The brilliant production design has to be an insider’s job.
This film is directed by one Ribhu Dasgupta. The picture itself is a suspense thriller set in Cal, and mostly around cops, with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vidya Balan in the cast; and it has been produced by Sujoy Ghosh. Checking those many boxes, a reference to Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012) is, I guess, inevitable.
Is it as thrilling? Probably not. Feels slower, for sure. But is it engaging enough? Hell, yeah!
Here’s briefly what’s going on here. Bachchan plays an old, middleclass man who lost his grandkid in a freak kidnapping episode eight years ago. The grand-pop has been fixated on solving that terrible mystery since. Much water has flowed under the bridge. The cop (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who was investigating that case is a priest now.
A new kidnapping case meanwhile comes up that the audience is led to believe is a copy-cat crime eight years hence. Vidya Balan, in salwar kameez civilian uniform, is the sleuth investigating the current case.
Teen is based on Jeong Keun-seob’s 2013 thriller Montage. So the basic writing has basically been outsourced to Korea. This has been a pretty common practice in Bollywood since the Koreans started churning out stellar scripts after the South Korean government began investing heavily in movies in the early 2000s. As it turns out, even the other Friday Bollywood release this week, Do Lafzon Ki Kahaani, was adapted from a Korean film Always, which has already been made in Kannada as Boxer!
Does this plot keep you thoroughly on the edge of your seat though? Sometimes, yes, although there are a couple of loose ends, and like with so many Korean pix, relationships lack depth.
But you move along, mainly because there’s Bachchan before us. We’ve seen him on screen for almost 50 years now, and yet of late he manages to surprise us far more than he did during the peak of his career in the ‘70s. This time as the old John, with a hunchback, mouth wide-open, droopy eyes, circling around in a scooter, patiently piecing together bits and clumps of evidence from his grand-child’s kidnapping case. You alternatively stare at the lost man, and his city.
And since everything about films or reviews sadly boils down to the stars, let me just put it right away, like the usual TV anchor, “Teen picture ko milte hain teen star!” That user rating of course being a function of your own expectations from a film. This one, seriously low on hope and hype, keeps your expectations in check, and therefore satisfies you hugely!
Mayank Shekhar’s book NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING, part-serious, part funny non-fiction on desis and pop-culture, is available online and at leading bookstores