Sameera Reddy, Prosenjit and Buddhadeb Dasgupta on the sets of The Voyeurs

Meanwhile this weekend, deprived of any large-scale Durga Puja celebrations in London, Bengalis living here did at least, thanks to LFF, get to check out Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s new film, The Voyeurs. It was screened in the same weekend as the Big B starrer, The Last Lear — but that didn’t stop it from selling out.

Hosted by Cary Rajinder Sawhney and introduced by Dasgupta himself, the screening was watched at London’s National Film Theatre by a fifty-fifty audience of South Asians and South Asia enthusiasts.

So how did it fare? It seemed to raise a few laughs here and there, but I wasn’t, admittedly, sure the film was exactly going down a storm. “The movie seemed a little naive to me,” one German viewer told me. He had been following it with the English subtitles — though the dialogue was, of course, almost entirely in Bengali.

As far as plot is concerned, The Voyeurs follows country boy Yasin (Amitav Bhattacharya), after he heads for Calcutta to join his friend Dilip (Prosenjit), a CCTV technician. Dilip’s life revolves around a bedroom poster of Bolly pin-up Madhubala, until a stunning young woman Rekha (Sameera Reddy) moves in next door to him.

Frustrated at his lack of facetime with her, Dilip takes to watching Rekha using a surveillance camera installed in her bedroom. Rekha eventually cottons on and calls the cops — sending Dilip and Yasin on the run, and inadvertently causing them to get entangled in a police hunt for a terrorist.

Admittedly I found the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy rather awkward: one scene in which Dilip is chased ineffectually by the seven cops is followed by a gritty exposition of the torture of terrorists by the Indian police. In the Q&A session afterwards I asked Dasgupta why he had opted for such a tragic-comic approach. “It is a better reflection of life itself,” was his answer. “Tragic and comic happenings are not separated in reality.”

Also this week I got a sneak preview of the upcoming Brad Pitt movie, due to be released here in December. It is called (deep breath required) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But, indulgent title aside, it’s a treat. Never has a movie about cowboys and bandits been filmed with such thrilling aesthetic precision. Tenderness and beauty are cradled inside a breathlessly severe puritan, sepia tone aesthetic. Snow-swept hillsides, corn-swept horizons, train robberies, fin-de-siecle gun-law and Brad Pitt: it’s all here and come December the UK box office may require saloon-style swing doors.

Jack Lamport (A writer and part-time actor based in London)