Netflix's Tooth Pari Lacks Bite (& Logic)

Bite Club

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

THERE is no easy way to say this: it is not a great time to be a Bengali in Hindi films. Let me explain. In the last month alone there have been three outings — a film released in the theatres, a film playing on a streaming site, and a web show — which placed Bengalis as the centerpiece of stories, and shortchanged observations and nuance for broad-stroke statements. In Ashima Chibber’s March-released Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway, a fictional retelling of a 2011 real-life tragedy where an Indian couple were separated from their children in Norway, a Bengali mother is depicted as a baffling personality who is prone to making a performance of her grief. This month Anushree Mehta’s Mrs Undercover, centering on a housewife who is revealed to be a special agent, presented a Bengali household with such apathy that it best works as a cautionary tale. The recent addition to this unenviable list is Pratim D Gupta’s Tooth Pari, an eight-episode show on Netflix that does the impossible task of competing with the towering brand of badness standardised by the aforementioned ventures…and making one wish that Bengalis, a mostly harmless community fond of their sweets, were extinct. At least narratively.

BLOODLESS SHENANIGANS

Tooth Pari Continues The Great Bengali Bungling, With Fangless Vampire Tale

By Ishita Sengupta

GUPTA’s incompetence stings more because it feels like betrayal. Betrayal borne out of what could have become of the solid premise he had in place, but didn’t. Betrayal stemming from wasting the potential of Saswata Chatterjee and Tillotama Shome. The filmmaker saddles them with roles which would have been rejected even in school plays. In this case, they encumber the craft of the gifted actors. Betrayal also — and more crucially — tied to his derived perception of Calcutta that reduces the city to a sterile set and empties out its charm. The list could go on. At its core, the filmmaker’s new show is an architecture of error, an instance of everything Gupta and the actors he assembles should not have done.

A vampire with a broken fang visits a reluctant dentist and falls in love with him. This single-line premise enfolds the promise of a great love story. The hunter not just gives her rusted heart to the hunted but in a metaphorical way, a broken soul seeks another to feel complete. Gupta opts for The Twilight route, a romantic excursion, but also expands it. Rumi (Tanya Maniktala) is a wide-eyed vampire who walks the streets at night. But in a city like Calcutta, which is a conglomeration of souls who have been left behind, she cannot be the only one. She belongs to a group of undead vampires who live in a cavern that opens up from the pillar of a metro station. Spatially, their world is placed below the underground, the distinct location telling of their cultural liminality. They are situated at the bottom — of both sensitivity and acknowledgement.

Given that vampires are drawn from folklore, designing a narrative around them inadvertently frees one from formulaic clutches. There are endless possibilities to frame a story and even lend a layered reading. In the recent past, Anik Dutta’s genre-defining Bhooter Bhabishyat serves as a compelling example of this. The 2012 Bengali film is a fascinating satire on ghosts in Calcutta who are running out of dilapidated places to stay due to the construction of skyscrapers. Dutta used this as a smokescreen to draw attention to the parasitic cycle of modernity that is drowning out whatever remains of the past.

I thought of Bhooter Bhabishyat more than once while watching Tooth Pari. Not just because Gupta was also dabbling with otherworldly creatures — and Saswata Chatterjee is an abiding presence in both — but because he was striving so hard to achieve what Dutta had, with no success. You can see it in the details. The vampires, living in the dugout, comprise those who have been undead for centuries. Dutta had mined the immortality of his protagonists and the varying timelines they come from, with stupendous success. It was a hoot. Tooth Pari attempts something similar, but my lips barely twitched.

The problem lies in the unimaginative characters and their stilted characteristics. The group of vampires residing in the hideout are looked over by someone called Ora, who spends most of his time hibernating. He is not shown initially, as if to evoke dread. But when he does appear, the portrayal is so farcical that he comes across as a kid who is just fond of sleeping. There is David (played by Chatterjee) who was possibly alive during India’s independence. He tells stories about Gandhi but mainly lurks around the streets of Calcutta with his bowler hat and sunglasses on at night. Then there is Meera (Shome) who spends her time sprouting Urdu and donning jewellery, like she is awaiting her audition in a nationalistic film where she is supposed to be a Pakistani. Finally, there is Rumi the rebel (Maniktala) who refuses to feed on blood from the blood bank (like the rest are instructed to do) and, defying orders, goes ‘Upar’ from the subterrain to look for fresh human blood. It is here that she chances upon a mollycoddled Bengali dentist, Bikram Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari) and falls in love with him. He, just as the doctor had prescribed, is a virgin and his blood is all the more tasty to the mythical beings. Honestly, the writing in Tooth Pari is so basic (Gupta taking all the accessible lore and making a detestable cocktail out of them) that as a mortal being who possesses neither their appetite nor their taut skin, I have taken offense on the vampires’ behalf.

Even when the series deals with these two narrative fragments, it does not work. Gupta can never figure out the tone he is going for (something that contributed to Bhooter Bhabishyat’s immense watchability). In one scene Tooth Pari comes across as a satire, in the other there is a drastic shift in the mood. Momentarily it gives the impression of being a love story but in the very next moment it devolves into a spoof without being one. It never really commits to one tonality. What remains common is the inadvertent comicality embedded in it. For instance, it will take me a long time to recover from the sight of Roy giving his hand to Rumi to suck blood from. He does it as nonchalantly as if he were offering her chocolate. In fact, men offering their blood is a love language in Tooth Pari.

Gupta, however, does not restrict himself to this alone. He includes an incomprehensible sub plot of a blood racket, led by Adil Hussain who is inexplicably given a Rabindranath Tagore wig, a Wiccan group called Cutmundus led by their leader Luna Luka (Revathy), and an alcoholic police officer (Sikandar Kher) whose Alzheimer’s-afflicted father (who else but Anjan Dutt) was slighted many moons ago for his belief in the presence of vampires. In a tryst of fate, he too inherits the same burden of distrust. If it sounds too much, it comes across just as that — thematically incoherent and unnecessary. The filmmaker ties these strands with contrivances and then seeks resolving them with more contrivances. We are made to believe that everyone knows everyone but the subtext is never explained. There is ample evidence to show a second season is in the offing but that cannot sanction incoherence in the story one is choosing to tell.

There is also a niggling problem of logic. I understand a Bengali man, who grows up under the overbearing presence of his parents, can get a little carried away with new-found female attention but it is unfathomable to me that Roy coyly smiles when Rumi licks blood from his hand and suspects she can be a vampire only when someone accuses him of being one? There is more: how does anyone and everyone just walk into Roy’s chamber as they please? Is lock and key no longer a concept? Why is Sikandar Kher doing this to himself? Why is Revathy doing this to herself? How much longer does Rajatava Dutta need to do the same exaggerated renditions of a Bengali father for makers to offer him meatier parts. Does Anjan Dutt only shoot in summers? If not, what is his allergy to clothes? The last few questions are not related to the series but you get my point.

In all fairness, nothing works for Tooth Pari except the stunning opening credits. Scored to Neel Adhikari’s music, it is a fascinating graphic novel-like sequence that does more in a matter of seconds than what the show achieves in eight episodes, each approximately 45 minutes long. The acting is subpar, the worldbuilding is so rudimentary that it feels DIY. Given that Gupta squanders what he was supposed to do, the little snippets of inside jokes — his way of showing what he can also do — reek of smugness. In one scene Rumi asks a cab driver to drop her to Maniktala, a neighbourhood in North Calcutta which is also a namesake of her real surname. In another instance when Bikram comes to know the truth about Rumi and they have a falling out at the metro station, a shiny billboard splashed with an advertisement asking for blood features in the background. A random character is arbitrarily called Utpal Dutt, named after the legendary Indian actor. These would have worked like a hotel called Agapastala or the fictional place called Tiktiki did in Anurag Basu’s 2017 Jagga Jasoos because even without them the musical holds up. In Tooth Pari they fall flat as Gupta mistakes embellishment for engagement.

Watch Tooth Pari Here

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