Hubba: Beginning of a new genre of Bengali cinema

A young student caught copying in the exam becomes visibly irate and in a flash, he sprinkles ink on the teacher’s face as he runs away from the classroom, away from the harsh reality, acute poverty and the farcical society. The child then takes a cool dip in a nearby pond, naked. Does this signify his determination to create his own path of freedom or revenge? Or is it a dive into the world of darkness? Or losing the battle for decent survival as his touchy, tender mind shows his bare back to the world? However, with clear signage of a metamorphosis, Bratya Basu’s film ‘Hubba’ buzzes around the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘The Child With the Looking Glass’. And Nietzsche’s child here takes on the wheel as Hubba Bimal keeps on haunting us with his dialogue, ‘Remember, I am driving the car, not you!’

Noted thespian and Sahitya Award-winning playwright Bratya Basu’s astonishing cinematic expression marks the beginning of a new genre of Bengali filmmaking. ‘Hubba’ is not a forthright gangster biopic. Rather, it is an artistic blend of dark humours, fierce action, romanticism, unending satires and a tribute to a particular time and culture with a modern approach to Bengali cinema in its entirety. The motif ‘Hubba’ here undoes the savagery lurking behind the social mask of every human being, augmenting a sense of universal.

Bratya’s ideation comes from Supratim Sarkar’s (IPS) book, ‘Goyendapith Lalbazar’, detailing a few special criminal cases where CID had to sweat a lot to capture those self-professed dons. Hubba Shyamal is one of them. The film, of course, reveals the rise and fall of Hubba Shyamal, alias Dawood of Hooghly, with his changed name Bimal, as well as his close associates, Bokaro Bapi, Umesh, Khepu and Chikua. From a disturbed childhood, Bimal gradually transforms into a dreaded anti-social. Numerous police cases are registered against him for ruthless murders, dacoity, wagon-breaking and looting in the 1980s. Soon, he rises to the top of the police’s ‘most wanted’ list. “Bimal is not ‘a run of the mill local master’,” exclaims the DIG, CID Operations, Dibakar Mitra in the film. Basu’s Hubba was unfurled after his arrest in 2005. The flashbacks narrate the story of the underworld and its well-known nexus and lawlessness.

Timely arrayed scenes going back and forth create some exotic moments in the action-packed, high-voltage thriller. Hubba Bimal is seen idealising the Bombay film industry with the fostered ‘Don-culture’. Therefore, exasperated Hubba murmurs, "When will the ‘culture’ of Bengal change?” The surreal glimpse of a flying Hubba firing at his in-laws while his first love, Tapashi, keeps dancing elucidates the feeling of a ruling don. Painting Hubba as a romantic and cinema-loving don, the director pays a memorable homage to iconic series of Bollywood films starting from ‘Sholay’ till ‘Ab tak Chhappan’. Even a popular Bengali film makes its place on the list. Intelligently mixed among the scenes, a few hit Bengali and Hindi film songs bring back the essence of Bengali and Hindi mainstream cinemas of the 1980s.

Through his neatly woven routes, director Bratya Basu shows he has no time to show cliché, shallow sentiments in his story-telling. So, his presentation boldly encapsulates political connections with the underworld, which not only plays a bigger role in the electoral process of the state but also encroaches upon the personal lives of the people in the higher echelon of society. Significantly, he exposes a major conflict of power and value structures between the upper and lower-middle-class Bengalis. Police Chief Dibakar Mitra appears to lose track often while interrogating Hubba. The striking similarities between events in Hubba’s life unsettle him repeatedly. Once the façade of middle-class hypocrisy is shattered, Dibakar starts hallucinating, discovering a ‘Hubba’ in him too. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra thus realises that his teaching is useless, as people in the higher edifice of power will always use the expendables to climb up the social ladder and will get rid of them when the time comes.

Gambhira Bhattacharjee as young Hubba is a revelation in the film. Cigarette dangling from one corner of his lips, he spews venom at whoever comes in his way. At the same time, he is open and naïve in expressing his feelings of love and sexuality. Surpassing all, Gambhira gifts the audience with such a powerful performance that it reaches the demonic peak in its own style. Police Chief Indraneil Sengupta is as smart and suave as the character demands. Probably he is the lone professional big-screen actor who acts flawlessly in the film. Just imagine that the rest are all stage actors. This is Bratya’s principle of filmmaking, which Bollywood can never afford to dream about. Besides Gambhira, Mosharraf Karim shows his acting prowess as a mature Hubba Bimal, cloaking himself with the shrouds of varying layers.

Bimal is dreadful with his ‘poite cut’ (killing a person with a dagger like the way a sacred thread is worn), killing and razor-sharp while fooling the police. He is a Robinhood in front of the poor, but at the same time, his hedonistic behaviour knows no limit. The biggest surprise is Bangladesh’s best actor doing away with his sweet Bangladeshi accent to become a don of Hooghly district. Lokenath Dey, as Bokaro Bapi, is very honestly calibrated. Though his character gets overshadowed by others, he wears his heart to his sleeve in this role. Buddhadeb Das as Bagha shows his spark as a truly rival gang leader. No one can do it better than the experienced Ashok Majumdar in the role of Nayan Guha, the devious political leader. Zinia Roy’s Tapashi fits well in her role.

The aesthetic usage of sitar and flute as background scores holds the emotion in the right spirit and deals well with the rising strain in the story as it moves forward. Prabuddha Banerjee’s music here, at the time of climax, action, tension, romance and comedy, is clearly distinct in its own character. Singer Shilajit’s melodious ‘dushtu lok’ fits perfectly with the narrative of the film. Outstanding is DOP Soumik Halder’s work. Scanning his camera through the small bleak colonies, half-clogged canals, dingy shanties and slumped industrial belts, he has done justice to the director’s choice of places in shot-taking. The choice of sombre hues to describe the past rightly conveys the mood of the scene. Finally, the making of a quality film depends on good editing. Barring a couple of scenes in the film, Sanglap Bhoumik is superb at his job. Squeezing raw footage of so many hours to two hours of gut punch is no less credible. No doubt, the fight sequences in the film deserve a special mention.

Nobody can deny that history, which looks virtually simple to others, never appears monolithic in Bratya Basu’s lens. Upholding the unseen and the forgotten, his magical voice behind the text becomes crisp, well-sorted and to the point, like what we see in his research-based plays, Mir Jafar, Boma and Ruddhasangeet. In ‘Hubba’, philosophically, the operation of friendship, as an opposition to love is revisited. ‘Friendship’, to the motif of the ‘child’, has several reverberations in Nietzsche’s corpus, therefore he counters in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: “Woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love. In woman, a slave and a tyrant have too long been concealed.” Probably following this dialectic, Basu’s ‘Tapashi’ (real name) connives with CID Chief Dibakar at a crucial juncture! In the end, it never appears that Basu has glorified a gangster’s fate in his film, but like his other protagonists, Hubba knocks on our subconscious again about who is the real guilty here in this case.