After Felu-Da and Byomkesh, turn of the Kiriti now to turn into celluloid in recent years. Kiriti has been played by Indraneil Sengupta, Priyanshu Chatterjee and Chiranjeet in Bengali film industry within last few years, and I saw the first of them, Nilacholey Kiriti. The successful male Indian models who turned to cinema, many of them thrived too for various reasons, have unfortunately not been great actors. Indraneil when directly compared to the actors playing sleuth in different other detective Bengali movies now, turn out to be among the weakest. His acting looked flat, lacking any mannerism or expression, and more importantly the charisma required to don iconic roles. Kiriti is a popular detective character penned by none other than Nihar Ranjan Gupta and our literary classics need better treatment than this. Very ordinary direction and story telling, not much use of background score to build up the mystery, not providing the viewer with time or interest to think over the crime, the entire thing is one flat line seemingly hurriedly told. Other than Indraneil, Rituparna was sub par, Abhishek Chatterjee was never a good actor, Arunima Ghosh was okay, Shantilal Mukherjee, a brilliant actor (I am a fan of his, never got his due from the industry), he obviously did well, rather an unknown actor who played Radha/Ramanuj in a challenging role caught eye. Overall, I would reiterate Bengali literature is very rich, and our literary gems demand up to the mark portrayal when turned into celluloid, however low the budget may be, which seemed the case for this film though. 5.5/10 is all I can give..
Review of Nilachaley Kiriti
