It’s easy to process the crushing familiarity of a movie like Keu Bole Biplobi Keu Bole Dakat (“Some call him a Revolutionary, some call him a Dacoit”). Mainstream Indian cinema has long run out of ways to stage populist fiction about swaggering vigilantes meting out their own versions of justice. So storytellers often choose the crutch of nonfiction. For instance, KBBKBD is a big fat superstar vehicle posing as a historical action drama. The figure it’s about — in this case, the controversial revolutionary Ananta Singh — is just a narrative vessel. The framework exists almost entirely so that Bengali superstar Jeet can flex his muscles as a Robin Hood-coded rebel and righteous superhero who fights for the oppressed in a broken system.
There are multiple entry shots, slow-mo cigars, cop-versus-criminal chases and heists, origin stories, lines like “don’t make me choose between mother and motherland” and “one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist,” pained notes of Vande Mataram, even courtroom monologues against corruption and politicians. In a way, it’s Ananta Singh who plays Jeet; history is just a ready accessory. In terms of the legacy chosen to stage this mass-biopic language, it makes sense.
Most commercial bases are covered. The film opens in post-independence India in the 1960s, when Calcutta is still grappling with the twin burdens of autonomy and borrowed identity. Singh is a charismatic movie producer by day and a lawless vigilante by night. When he’s not doing the Bruce Wayne shtick, his Batman avatar leads the far-left armed political faction called the Revolutionary Communist Council of India doing the usual crimefighting stuff: donning cool disguises, robbing guarded trucks and banks while carrying a transistor belting out protest anthems (“a musical dacoit?”), defying the government as a rage-filled people’s champion, punishing rotten-apple cops, and restoring faith on the streets of Calcutta.
An eccentric inspector (Tota Roy Chowdhury) with a morally conscious dog is put on his case. You know he’s the opposite side of the same coin when he is compared to Uttam Kumar and scoffs at a rival, “I don’t chase stars on a uniform; I am for the truth and that makes me a star”. This man, Durga Prasad Roy, closes in on his target only to spend the rest of the film as a dutiful student being given an elaborate history lesson. Naturally, he will be inspired and humbled by the very criminal he was hired to nab. The exposition device is almost comical: Roy bursts into the house of Singh’s comrade, arrests him, but then patiently listens to the chap narrate Singh’s four-decade-long backstory. He believes every word without interrupting, Marxist propaganda be damned.
What’s interesting is that the film opts to explore a very specific idea of patriotism. Singh starts out as a nationalist like everyone else, fighting for the concept of an India everyone dreams of. He’s a proud revolutionary who opposes Gandhi’s ideals, but his disillusionment with the post-independence reality forces him to come out of retirement to secure a different kind of freedom; only now, he is known as a dreaded dacoit. He has no trust in the makeshift bureaucracy, so he does his own thing. What’s not interesting is that the screenplay flattens the violent pursuit of communism and glorifies a complicated character to service the life-template formula. The intent, of course, is to place Jeet in as many timelines and hero-arcs as possible. Needless to say, this comes at the cost of ideological curiosity.
It’s normal for revisionism to be passed off as creative license, but it often feels like several templates jostling for fan service. There’s little for viewers interested in the biographical story and psychological toll of freedom — other than the conveyor belt of dialogue-heavy face-offs, 1980s-Bollywood-level production design, and set-pieces with questionable CGI. Brawling on top of a truck and train has never been so screensaver-ish for a film of this scale. Some of the heists (like a production crew actually robbing a post office under the guise of filming) are entertaining. But it spends too long in the past, establishing Singh as a simple right-or-wrong hero through Wikipedia filmmaking. His times with Surya Sen, his role in the famous Chittagong armoury raid, and his melodramatic descent into anonymity as a patriot being turned away from pension offices follow a stagey pattern; widely recorded events are revisited through the lens of Singh-is-king-because-Jeet-is-king bravado. This is not unusual for tropey actioners masquerading as bleeding-heart biopics, but the execution is surprisingly bland for a story that revels in anti-establishment angst.
I haven’t been too acquainted with modern Bengali cinema, even if the film references its own ilk through meta moments like an actress throwing a tantrum or the prosecutor criticizing Singh for fleecing citizens with the populist movies he produces. But the grammar of ‘masala’ storytelling is similar across the board. One can tell that — akin to Hindi counterparts like Jawan or Tamil counterparts like any new-age Rajinikanth title — the movie leans into Jeet’s off-screen aura as much as his greatest hits. It’s just not effective despite the ready-made context, because the filmmaking seems to be imitating the spectacle of other industries. So much so that Keu Bole Biplobi Keu Bole Dakat could’ve been titled Kisi Ka Star Kisi Ka Bhagwan (“Someone’s Superstar, Someone’s God”), and we would be none the wiser. But much older.