Dracula Sir – review

Director: Debaloy Bhattacharya

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

This film in Bengali is an unusual one for the page as it isn’t strictly a vampire film (though this is not entirely unheard of for the page). At best there is someone acting like a vampire and possibly a belief in vampires. However the vampire motif is front and centre in what was a really interesting, well put together (for the most part) piece of cinema that defied my expectations.

It starts in a field with a jeep driving in the distance and we are in Kolkata in 1971. The jeep stops and three police men and a prisoner, Amol Shom (Anirban Bhattacharya), get out. Amol is narrating as the police point him in the direction of China and say he is free. He wonders how fast he must run to outpace a bullet and is shot in the back.

hiding his mouth

Jump to 2020 and Raktim (also Anirban Bhattacharya) is getting ready to go to work. As he leaves his rented room he sees the child that lives there, Bultai, who runs off scared. Raktim is a temporary teacher in a school and his class are playing up as they wait - some wearing paper fangs. When he gets in class he sees that someone has written Dracula Sir on the board. We note that he covers his mouth with a hanky as he speaks. After class he visits a memorial to Amol Shom.

fangs

Raktim has pronounced canines and is very self-conscious of them; he is is very socially awkward as a result. He is used by his landlord to scare Bultai into going to bed by baring them and leering at him. One day, on the way to school, he gets a call from a director who wishes to use him in a film and, when he turns the offer down, his head teacher (related to the director) forces him to take the role lest he not be made a permanent teacher. He goes to the set, is put into a (Lugosi-esque) costume and makeup and… actually bites the lead actress as they film the scene. This leads to him being beaten and then sacked from the school, and triggers his breakdown…

Amol and Manjari

Or is it a breakdown? Maybe it is an awakening? Intercut with the scenes from 2020 is Amol’s story. A Naxalite (part of the Communist revolutionary movement) he is hiding from police with his ex-lover, Manjari (Mimi Chakraborty), who has since been both married and widowed. As things develop the worlds start to intercede, both with similar moments past and present cut into a scene and the fact that Raktim starts to remember what happened and the film offers a reading that he is Amol reincarnated.

drinking blood

The teeth, it is implied, are as they are because the police ripped out Amol’s canines when they caught and tortured him. However, the vampire persona also becomes part of the equation with Raktim actually drinking blood at one point. He also sees Manjari, who speaks to him and urges revenge on those who betrayed her and Amol. The film never fully settles on reincarnation and he is eventually diagnosed as having schizophrenia and alternative reasoning is offered for some of his apparent knowledge of the past. At the end the film remains open, with the reading of the text – reincarnation or delusions following a breakdown – down to the viewer.

bite

It is a beautifully shot film with an interesting and complex interweaving of two timelines. Anirban Bhattacharya is in turns convincingly socially awkward as Raktim and emotionally tortured as Amol as he is torn between his love for Manjari and his loyalty to the revolution. The story holds the viewer but the film has a fault and it is within pacing and length – at least to a Western viewer. It does not have musical/dance moments, but it has several full song musical interludes where montages are accompanied with songs whose lyrics relate to the story and they, quite simply, snarled the pace and added nothing to the narrative that wasn’t in the actual dialogue sections. I recognise that this is a very Western view of film editing but, for me, it damaged a film that would have, with better pacing, scored higher than the 6.5 out of 10 that I am giving it.

The imdb page is here.

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