Review: Murder by the Sea by Anjan Dutt

 Murder by the Sea, the third web series by Anjan Dutt is deliberately nuanced and intricate. Dutt tries his best to experiment with his unique narrative, designing the plot and keeping the audience glued to the screen. His effort is visible in each episode. Not only does he cast himself to support the crew whenever other characters fall short, but also he ensures that dialogues are quirky, sleek in narration and communicate exactly the way it is needed. That being said, no frontline characters are of less importance here - all of them contribute equally to drive the plot and create a tense interconnection among each other in terms of conflict, relationship, or power play.

The pace here is brewed slowly with care as Dutt attempts to make his characters reliable but not commoners or easily traceable from our daily lives. While doing so, he shifts the homicide location to Puri which is often explored as a tourism hotspot like Darjeeling in Murder in the Hills, but never thought of as the locale of a murder mystery. Now, this is where the actual challenge to keep up the story's credibility lies. First, dealing with unreliable characters or even more with an unreliable narrator in the first place as a professional author of a crime thriller, who also suffers from bipolar disorder constantly disrupts the audience’s notion of acceptance. Dutt plays smart here, really smart, but does he succeed? Second, using Puri as a location of a murder mystery, which is a populous city and always crowded with tourists, a crime is being committed in broad daylight with a pistol where no one is present. It adds to an additional layer of questioning the plausibility of the events.

Every episode ends with a cliffhanger which initially whets up further interest to explore the next chapter, but soon it ends up as a predictable dramatic instrument, overused and decrepit. After two or three episodes, one cannot miss how the story is deliberately driven towards the prescribed cliffhanger and to do so, it repeatedly neglects the smartness of sequencing of the events. At times, the shots overlap with each other and are unintentionally superfluous, which might be a cancerous lacuna for a thriller. What kicks off as a slowly brewed Italian coffee turns to be a cold and bland Assam tea after a few episodes, as consequentially it becomes a laggard.

The series suffers from misplaced or rather uneven characterisation too. An author with bipolar disorder becomes so lesser than life that one could hardly sympathise with her predicament. At times, she is too perfect in her decisions, but that is often jarred by a repetitive dose of melodramatic consumption of lithium tablets. While Dutt tries to bring out the dichotomy in her portrayal here, it ironically boomerangs on her representation as it never suits the pathological representation of a psychologically perturbed sleuth. The character of Arjun Chakraborty or Trina Saha triggers no interest as often they are the couple next door with no apparent spark in their acting. It is painful to see Arjun Chakraborty who is otherwise a brilliant actor so much misused or rather underutilised. However, Anjan Dutt, Suprabhat Das, Ananya Chatterjee, Sujan Mukherjee and especially Rupankar Bagchi contribute colossally to save Murder by the Sea from becoming a theatrical blunder. Rupankar Bagchi, Anjan Dutt and Ananya Chatterjee are the three pillars which hold some of the interest of the audience who are still ardent fans of Anjan Dutt.

The climax is pathetically flawed as it is almost impossible to overlook how two characters, struggling with their past could not recognise each other so far, save for a vague feeling of déjà-vu. To refrain myself from spoilers, let me only highlight that it is not ideally possible for two reasons - first, if one of them were already a grown-up then the other person would surely able to recognise him, because over the years, (twenty or so?) his appearance would not drastically change and second, their difference of age was also not visible at all in the screen. The loosely structured storyline is purposely made whipsmart, which is a real letdown.

Murder by the Sea is a malnourished brainchild who is born with loads of labour but fails to live up to the mark because of its repetitive failed experimentations and inherent cerebral palsy. What is commendable here is Dutt’s indomitable spirit in experimenting with new avenues even as a sexagenarian, which is perhaps the only way to seek novelty in the mundane and mediocrity. It is lovely when Rupankar Bagchi sings Rabindra sangeet on the beach, outbursts in the penultimate episode with grief, Neel Dutt supports his best in the background score and the camera brings out a strange sepia undertone to highlight the jaundiced nature of the characters and their struggle. Since I read Puri Samudrer Kalo Jol from Detect Danny Inc, I also appreciate how Dutt modified the story and made it at least more brainy than the original story as Satyajit Ray also did while filming Jay Baba Felunath.

I wish in the upcoming ventures, a more mindful yet credible and connected-to-life approach will be taken by Anjan Dutt as his increasing sincerity and artistic efficiency as a web series maker is noticeable if we compare it with Murder in the Hills.