Te3n (Hindi)
Director: Ribhu Dasgupta
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Vidya Balan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sabyasachi Chakrabarty
In these days of edgy crime thrillers, Te3n takes us back to the old-fashioned detective, the kind we encountered in a Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot or the German TV series Der Alte (The Old Fox).
Amitabh Bachchan is John Biswas, a seeker of truth who rides a ramshackle scooter, has a penchant for cooking, fixing fans and spark plugs. Old, laidback, tenacious, eccentric though not as much as a Poirot, he turns to sleuthing not as a profession but in the wake of a personal tragedy that struck him eight years back. He is seeking justice rather than revenge.
Ribhu Dasgupta's Te3n , based on the 2013 South Korean film Montage , is slow, relaxed as against a quick-paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller. The kind that will keep the viewers engaged depending on their age, levels of patience and interest in easy-going mystery thriller.
The pace of Te3n also derives from the world it inhabits. The moody Kolkata of Kahani , of Durga visarjan and haggling over fish price. Unhurried but with lots happening beneath the surface, glorious yet decrepit.
Though dominated by the towering Big B, there are other interesting characters on the side. Martin (Nawaz) is a cop coming to terms with his own guilt in a kidnapping gone wrong by turning into a priest though not quite as successfully. A woman cop Sarita (Vidya) with a curious, undefined relationship with him. The three are thrown together, even as they follow their own leads, to solve an eight-year-old kidnapping mystery when a new one, mimicking the old comes calling.
One would have liked to see more of the two cops, their relationships and interactions. Same for the banter and bond between the old man and the cop-turned-priest.
The situation is interesting but the process of investigation, the clues, their piecing together doesn't set one's grey cells working. You never quite sit up and wonder what next. The parallel investigations around which the film's narrative is built, the move back and forth in time confuses rather than add to the viewers' involvement. The climax gets disappointing with its predictable, explanatory touch. As a viewer, I like coming out of a mystery with questions on my mind than neat resolutions of all the loose ends.
NAMRATA JOSHI
