Nothing’s hit

Sandip Ray’s Hit-List is an interesting case of a good story dealt with rustiness. True, it’s a break from the ungainly fare that paints characters in pure black-n-white, and the film doesn’t for once repose on the handed-down wisdoms of mainstream Bengali films. But all its efforts to entertain with a relaxed treatment of a crime story collapse for a shaky script and shakier performances.

But Hit-List shows Sandip wanted to spare himself the mechanics of Feluda-franchise. His camera makes his characters look more human, say, than that of his last non-Feluda film, Nishijapon. The story would have offered enough temptation for the camera to go edgy. But it rather moves as if on a vigil to register the psychological developments of characters, often putting to test the acting skills unflinchingly. Some come through, some don’t.

Koel Mullick looks elegant as the protagonist though. It’s for some time now she has been facing camera and standing immodest arc lights, under layers of kitschy greasepaint called makeup in Tollywood. Here we see an innocent face for the first time that will charm Koel’s followers— that is, if they decide to take a break from potboilers that cast her. This innocence is lapped up and worked to perfection by camera, to create the poise of a woman who’ll cold-bloodedly murder her husband’s killers in an ad-agency, being among them all along as a colleague. But Koel’s acting just refuses to cooperate.

Dhritiman Chatterjee goes beyond the limits the script set for him, as an ex-cop at the task of solving the case of serial deaths in the agency. He rules the screen and makes us indulge in a passing fancy what a great Feluda he would have made if he were young! Tota Roy Chowdhury, the team leader of the agency, whose idea to sell off top-secret presentations spins off a chain of deaths, did well in the first one-and-a-half hour. But he begins to look adrift as his team arrives at Kuala Lumpur for a photo-shoot.

However, there’s no point picking on him when the film itself rambles in this part, delivering much less than a climax. As to why the climax fizzles out, there can be more than one reason, most prominent among them is that the events or expressions that drive the story to climax look weak— too weak to prop up the penultimate sequence. The other three Chatterjees— Siddhartha, Sashwata and Saheb— somehow stay afloat in the sea of mistakes.

Hit-List has its moments. The scene that shows the murder of the Creative-head (played by Shubhrajit Dutta) is well composed. Or the one, where Dhritiman and Shashwata discuss the case over a billiard table, is impressive. A few of such moments mingle well with the central idea. But most others don’t, they hang loose and flake out. Had they not, the results would have been better. But it’s no use crying over split milk.