With Anirban Bhattacharya’s Mandar, the newly-released web-series for the Bengali-language streaming platform Hoichoi, the artistic bankruptcy can be finally considered to be over. Bhattacharya, so far seen as a top-notch actor in the Bengali film and theatre circuit, incidentally often seen in films by Mukherjee, Sen, et al, has debuted with his haunting, visually captivating adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Bard’s most popular, cinema-friendly play. Bhattacharya conjures up the magnificent world of Geilpur, a fictional coastal village in Purba Medinipur, West Bengal, portraying grimy fishermen jostling for supremacy modelled on Shakespeare’s immortal characters. Bhattacharya — first-class-first in theatre studies from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata — has recreated the characters with mind-boggling beauty, transporting us to a liminal world where the tiny mofussil fishing village of Geilpur pays one of the most memorable homages to Shakespearean Scotland’s “fair is foul, foul is fair”.

The five-part limited series, each episode coinciding with the five acts of the original text, breaks many grounds, and brings Bengali filmmaking up-to-speed with the national, even global standards of audiovisual storytelling. Chiefly, unlike the run-of-the-mill Bengali fare, Mandar shows, not tells. Bhattacharya, despite being a technical newbie, understands the grammar of filmmaking intuitively, and although he brings in many elements of theatre, particularly the cracker of a cast, his camera blends them beautifully with the architecture of the cinematic medium. After Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak, and to some extent, Rituporno Ghosh, the art of the mise-en-scène was nowhere to be found in Bengali cinema. Mandar, to our great delight, ushers in a visual and storyboarding benchmark that’s above and beyond anything that Bengali cinema has produced in decades.

Bhattacharya, just 35, revered already as the most cerebral yet popular Bengali actor of his time, has powerful montages and visual metaphors in every frame, with not even a leaf, a twig, or a chair that’s not helping invoke the mundane yet murderous world of Geilpur. The three witches of Macbeth in Mandar become the social outcasts (outcaste/s?) — an old hag of a woman (played by Sajal Mandal), her androgynous son (Sudip Dhara) and her curiously omnipresent black cat. They prophesise to survive, talk in aphorisms that some construe as truths yet-to-come, some dismiss as mad ramblings of an old coot), they give words to desires and ambitions and greed that fester within human hearts, especially that of Mandar’s.

The titular Mandar, played by the supremely talented Debashis Mondal, is one of the most physically demanding and bodily expressive Macbeths ever. Mondal, with eyes that say the unsaid and then some more, channels the many conflicts simmering within hyper-masculine Mandar tortured by erectile dysfunction, unable to perform the primal task of sexually satisfying his wife. The fractured mirror is both his companion as well as his harshest critic. His friend, Makai Das, whom he kills in the first episode, calls him the “Gandu of Geilpur”, a dumb brute. When in doubt, the muscular Mandar with bloodshot eyes does squats and planks in his village home, which boasts of a big-screen TV, but doesn’t have a closed off bathroom, just a designated corner where his wife, Laili, furiously washes the bed-sheets sullied by her extramarital sex. Sohini Sarkar, popular Bengali film actress who plays Laili, gives the boldest performance of her career, as this fishwife of a Lady Macbeth lusts and hungers for sexual gratification, a child, as well as power over Geilpur via Mandar’s rise as its overlord.

Similarly, Dablu Bhai, played by veteran stage and film actor, Debesh Roychowdhury, is the Duncan of Geilpur, the corrupt businessman under whom the fisherfolk toil away with their nets, and who wields his henchmen, Mandar and Banka (Banco from the original play), to get rid of anyone like Makai speaking up against him. Dablu Bhai is aided by Modon Halder (played by Loknath Dey, a take on Macduff), a local politician who doesn’t want his election prospects to be hampered by Geilpur’s internal tensions. There’s Mancha, Fontush and Lakomoni, the youngsters who would inherit the reins of Geilpur. There’s Dablu Bhai’s unnamed, long-suffering wife, played by Sumana Mukhopadhyay, who plays a key role in the turning of events. Bhattacharya himself can be seen in a small but significant role, that of Fate itself in Mukaddar Mukherjee, a slimy cop, who sees and hears everything only to exploit the characters, egging them on, pushing them further into the realm of no-return.

Like Quentin Tarantino’s episodic cinema with carefully and stylishly named chapters, Bhattacharya’s Mandar too has chapters, the Bengali titles of which have the fish metaphor in ascending order of the protagonist’s mental conflict. [The English translation of the titles are plain silly, as if from a desi version of SparkNotes.] “GholaJaler Mach” [Fish of Turbid Waters], “GobhirJaler Mach” Deep Water Fish, “Borshi Gantha Mach” [Speared Fish] are brilliant metaphors to encapsulate the bloody vortex of chaos that the fishing village finds itself sucked into, holding our hands till we arrive at the deathly denouement.

Abandoned boats where people make out, hide or are stabbed (or speared) to death, fish nets that strangle human throats, the meandering roads and unlit village paths that are seen from above as if in a maze, the beach front where dead bodies wash up, the old hag, her son and cat, the moss-clothed tree logs, the ominous horizon of the endless grey-blue sea-sky, the selfies and makeout videos that enflame forbidden desires, the clandestine visit to the sex doctor and hallucinations brought about by the potency injections — Mandar’s is a frenetically churning world that’s both familiar, yet ethereal. Bhattacharya’s ode to Purba Medinipur, his hometown, its sea-soaked salty dialect, complete with saffron flags in street corners subtly hinting at the highly-charged political equation (BJP’s Dilip Ghosh is the Lok Sabha MP from Medinipur constituency, and he had famously threatened to shut Bhattacharya up after the April-May 2021 Assembly elections) provide many more layers to the portraiture, like footnotes and asides of a Shakespearean play spoken directly to the Bengali audience, yet deserving mainstream attention like never before. No wonder then, Hoichoi has presented Mandar as the first of its “World Classics”, since Bengal’s creative ambition and money now ride on Bhattacharya’s eclectic, able shoulders. (IPA Service)