India’s answer to Forrest Gump
Not only is it India’s answer to ‘Forrest Gump’ but its India’s answer to Alejandro Jodorowsky too. I don’t know when was the last time I saw a truly Avant grade film like this from Indian cinema. Maybe I can say ‘Ship of Theseus’ but ‘Ship of Theseus’ too had certain plot, some interconnection and philosophical layer covering all of it. But here in ‘Herbert’ it blows you away by its filmmaking. I watched it quite coincidentally without knowing anything about the movie but it blew my brains away.
The film opens like a typical Jodorowsky film. Got me reminded of one of his opening scenes where a lone man would be sitting in a closed room in an extended shot. The opening scene of ‘Hebert’ was like that. There were so many events happening but everything was eccentric and so unconventional. It’s so easy for a film like this to lose plot but ‘Herbert’ holds fort so effortlessly.
What I thought would be a film which wouldn’t have any meaning at all gets slowly unraveled through the flashbacks. But it doesn’t mean that it loses its style and mystery. It is still stylish but with substance. That’s why I told that it doesn’t lose plot. The film happens majorly in three parts with three Herberts.
The flashbacks happen through a set of police investigations, somewhat like the style of ‘Midnight’s Children’ but more grounded. One by one the mystery gets out. First, we get to know about his parents, his father who gets killed by an accident when he goes with one of his affairs, his mother while drying clothes. Together they form a lovely combo. The movie is so much fun till his childhood. Just like a kid, the film too is carefree.
Then comes the adolescent stage which had every chance to falter but works amazing too. Actually, every part of the film could have been made as a separate film because that’s how much content they had. The easy thing about adolescent stage is romance and sex. So, with that in the offing and the communist thought fed in him, the movie effortlessly traverses through it. Herberts (Joyraj Bhattacharjee) crush Buki (Anindita Mallick) plays the perfect femme fatale of a non noir film. Imagine the same had happened in a film made out of R K Narayan, how lovely the melancholy would have been but as its by Suman Mukhopadhyay the film transcends to different realm.
The third part is the most serious of the lot. Something I thought I wouldn’t like because there is a compulsion to better the previous two versions. But the director has enough stuff to make even the third part a good one. In fact, it’s a pretty strong ending which connects everything but not compulsively. Herbert (Subhasish Mukherjee) now grown in stature gets involved with his cousin Binu (Neel Mukherjee) for left extremism. It is one of the emotional scenes, may be the only cinematic emotional scene in the movie, when he hugs him for extra few seconds. But the motive of both of them is truly different. We get to know that in climax.
After his cousin episode, he truly gets delusional and forms a “Dialogues with the Dead” with the help of his other not so sane but unjudgmental friends. That’s when things turn messy for him without his knowledge. Those were the sequences which could have easily gone bad by overacting but it works in a quirky yet serious film like this. By the climax we get to know exactly what all had happened except for Herberts thought process. Wish the ending had been more open but it couldn’t be open with something as big a bomb defusal. The way the last scene and the hugging scene gets compared was lovely but wish it would had happened at some other juncture. Because it is too great a film to be literal.
constantscribbles 