Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is Banerjee’s adaptation of Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s dhoti-wearing, quick-witted private eye who remains one of the most popular figures of Bengali literature

The teaser of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy may not have broken the internet, but that hasn’t dimmed producer-director Dibakar Banerjee’s enthusiasm. Yesterday at Film Bazaar in Goa, Banerjee spoke about the Kolkata that he has imagined as the setting of his upcoming film. Banerjee was joined by his production designer Vandana Kataria, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis, and associate creative producer, Vikas Chandra.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is Banerjee’s adaptation of Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s dhoti-wearing, quick-witted private eye who remains one of the most popular figures of Bengali literature. For many, the quintessential Byomkesh is the young Rajit Kapoor, who played the detective in a popular television series from the 1990s. Banerjee’s Byomkesh is not cut from the same cloth. Set in 1943, just after the First Japanese Bombing Raid, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is a tribute to noir cinema. The mystery plays out against a dramatic political setting – Calcutta is in danger of being blitzed by the Japanese – and takes the audience into a shadowy, crime-stained Calcutta as imagined by Banerjee, Kataria and Andritsakis.

“His story is the dark underbelly of Calcutta of 1943 which in itself kind of moves between reality and fantasy,” said Kataria, who along with Chandra has spent a long time researching the city’s history in order to build Detective Byomkesh Bakshy’s sets. “The story does that so the production design also does that. It very cleverly moves from real to fantasy, and back to real.” Banerjee wouldn’t give out any clues about the plot of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, but he did state quite emphatically that the film is not historical, despite all the research that has gone into its design. Instead, it’s a fantastical vision of Calcutta as Banerjee imagined it as a teenager addicted to Bengali murder mysteries.

“I think inside me there is a 14 year old Bengali boy who is forever on holiday,” said Banerjee, describing how his most persistent memories are of going to his aunt’s house and sitting at a windowsill with a pulpy detective novel. “There would be murders, there would be a body count, there’d be car chases, there’d be those noir locations in Calcutta,” he recalled. “All that that has had a grip on my imagination for a long time and I always had a love for pulp, not that it has shown in many of my films.”

Pulp as Banerjee and his team imagine it may not be exactly how most people understand the terms. There are no lurid colours in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy and neither is there shrieking or any other over-the-top element. In fact, to keep the colours in the film muted, Banerjee, Kataria and Andritsakis decided to change the season in which the film was set. “Originally this film was set in summer,” said Kataria. “But we decided to give it a winter twist because the common man of that time wears the homespun, the white, and in a noir film, we just did not want whites popping out. So we chose winter, so that everybody could have dark clothes on them.” Detective Byomkesh Bakshy’s final palette is cool spectrum of greys and browns, punctuated by splashes of stark white and rich jewel colours. The light lacks warmth, the shadows loom and smoke — whether it’s winter haze or cigarette smoke — lazily rings around buildings and characters.

The original plan for Detective Byomkesh Bakshy was to shoot it entirely on location in Kolkata, but that proved to be too expensive. Ultimately, Banerjee shot the bulk of the film in a Mumbai set and settled for just a few scenes (mostly set in exterior locations) in Kolkata. “We found out that some of the structures that we wanted to shoot inside, in Calcutta, were 100 to 120 years old and it was not safe for us to shoot,” said Banerjee.

“Then we found out that to find the old streets in Calcutta and shoot on them would mean blocking traffic, because it’s period so we’d have to change the traffic and the set, and we would only be able to shoot on weekends. Boom! Again, that means our 70 day schedule becomes 120 days. So another chunk of Kolkata exteriors came to Mumbai.” However, Banerjee did shoot a few scenes in Kolkata, as a result of which Kataria and her team ended up working with the city’s municipal corporation to repaint buildings and spruce up certain stretches to match the elegance of Calcutta in the 1940s. Most of the film, however, was shot in Mumbai on an elaborate set. Whatever problems the lack of funds threw at the film, Banerjee and gang countered with meticulous planning.

Keeping this in mind, it's poetically fitting that Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is a tribute to noir films because this genre was initially created by filmmakers who had shoestring budgets and so filled their frames with shadows so that they wouldn't have to make a detailed set.

“I grew up on film noir,” said Andritsakis, who was the cinematographer on LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha and Shanghai. This time, however, the film looks far more vintage and stylised than Andritsakis's earlier work with Banerjee. “I really felt like a child with my toys on set because you can create so many things with hard lighting because it doesn’t spread everywhere so you can really paint the image,” said the cinematographer. Hard lighting refers to an old technique of using direct light that sharpens definition and was used extensively in noir films to lend ominous gloom to a setting. Straddling contemporary cool with the visual tropes of noir, Andritsakis played around with how he used light Detective Byomkesh Bakshy. For one scene, shot on location in Kolkata, he had a canopy of black cloth stretching from rooftop to rooftop. “We just did not want to have the sun so much,” he recalled. “We laid black cloth above the buildings and that was like half a day’s work. Like 30 people to put on the black sheets, but it immediately transformed the way the whole street looked.”

Another trick that Andritsakis used was to use stretched pantyhose for a softening effect. “The contemporary cameras and lenses are very sharp,” he said. “Normally, they use filters in front of the camera, to soften; really expensive, high-tech filters in front of the lens. We used to take women’s stockings and stretch them behind the lens like they used to do back in the day when they didn’t have filters.“

Banerjee toying with the idea of adding a grainy texture to the film. “Nikos has an idea to bounce back our negative and then bounce back on digital and see,” said Banerjee. “So genuinely, physically degrade the image a bit and then come back to the projection quality image so that what you’re projecting has a bit of a grain and some of that imperfection that has, over the last 100 years, become the signature of the film look in our brains.”

Illusion is a large part of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy. After all, Banerjee, Kataria and Andritsakis have managed to make a set made up of a couple of avenues and seven streets seem like an entire city. Andritsakis figured out the direction in which the set should be built so that it catches light the best and then, the process of first building the set and then ageing it to look realistic followed. “Ageing is a huge process of all Dibakar Banerjee films,” said Kataria. “This is my third and you can’t give him clean walls or clean clothes. But the truth about Calcutta is that even in 1943, it was a 150, 200 year old city. So even in 1943, there are buildings there that are 100, 150 years old. So we’ve got to make them look like that.”

From the still photographs that Banerjee shared, the final set looks beautifully weathered. It’s a Calcutta crafted out of nostalgia, research and a very contemporary aesthetic that appreciates the elegance of distressed surfaces and crumbling grandeur. See it without sepia-tinted romanticism and you might notice that this is just a shade too pretty to be a real street, but Kataria has spared no effort in making her set as credible as possible. “I’ve put atta on walls and heat treated them to get papri out,” she said. “I have put tissue paper and heated to get flakes out. I’ve just tried all kinds of things. I’ve got dust and blown dust on the set for two days. Thrown water on set to get the trickle-down. Got moss to develop slowly. Made drains, put dirt there, let the drains flow. There was a whole actual reality process that we brought into it. I think it shows and it helps, and it feels real.”

Whether or not this is going to win over audiences, remains to be seen. Banerjee has already made a few Bengalis grumble with his decision to set the film in 1943 but not mention the famine that was raging through Bengal during that time. As far as Banerjee is concerned, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy is a fantasy and its story has no place for the harsh reality of skeletal, starving bodies that lined the streets of historical Calcutta in the 1940s. “What you’re doing is not recreating Calcutta of 1943,” said Banerjee. “You’re creating the illusion of Calcutta in 1943 for people who are living in 2015.”

Detective Byomkesh Bakshi is expected to release in February 2015.