In Arindam Bhattacharya’s Shibpur there are visuals that would probably never be greenlit for the Bengali big screen a decade ago — a bloody head rolling down a bylane, a mobster hanged to die at the same maachher bazaar where he had gutted a man like a fish, using a boti. OTT did Indian cinema a solid favour with its wave of crime productions. Thanks to the depictions of kachra mafia in Sacred Games or the copious gore of Mirzapur, there was zero flinching from the audience at the theatrics of Kharaj Mukherjee’s mob boss Tapan striking at a man’s bandaged arm or Swastika Mukherjee’s Mandira stabbing her husband’s killer with a sickle.Shibpur 2023 Movie Download
That doesn’t mean the violence is derivative or looks like a rip-off; it doesn’t. It holds up a side of the city’s violent past that is rarely talked about, when gang violence was rampant and police encounters were almost commonplace in certain pockets. The film gets the treatment right and the storytelling too has its merits.The problem lies with the script; the cluttered storylines and half-baked central characters weigh it down. In 132 minutes, it fails to give a solid character design to even one of the main players. No one really knows why the two reigning mob bosses Tapan and Nepal (Rajatava) are feuding, what their real motivations are or if Mandira really wanted a life of crime. Their personal priorities are blurred out almost entirely which makes it hard for anyone to care about who’s killing who.
In the eighties Shibpur, a government employee is killed in a gang-related incident. His widow Mandira struggles to get justice for her husband’s death and reaches out to a local goon named Tapan. With his help, she manages to track down her husband’s killers and kills one of them herself. Tapan gives her a small share in his business and in a few months Mandira becomes an influential figure in Shibpur. She becomes a mobster herself and an eyesore for the two other gang leaders Tapan and Nepal. However, it’s unclear how Mandira’s rise to power could be so unchecked and smooth that too in a crime circle so ridiculously dominated by men.