To the man who brought wit back to Bengali cinema

Growing up, Bengali cinema, for the longest time, wasn’t on my parents’ radar when it came to family viewing. But one weekend in 2012, while I was still in school, my parents broke the routine. I found myself in a theatre, watching Bhooter Bhabishyat. I faintly remember Maa saying, “Shobaai bolche cinema ta khub bhalo hoyeche, dekhte jete hobe.” At the time, I was far too young to understand that I was witnessing a cinematic resurrection. I simply watched it for how delightfully light-hearted it made me feel – the larger-than-life costumes and makeup, exaggerated songs and dialogues, caricatured character names. It was only much later, through repeated viewings, that I began discovering its sharper layers. From that day on, an Anik Dutta release became an unmissable event on our family calendar.For decades after the golden era of Bhanu Bandopadhyay, Rabi Ghosh and Jahor Roy, Bengali audiences had been living with a strange void. We missed that classic, full-bodied laugh on screen. In fact, only Ray before him could make audiences absorb social commentary through humour without forcing them to overthink or decode too much. Dutta, too, gave Bengali viewers exactly what they crave: a roaring good laugh that never insulted their intelligence. His cinema was accessible, yet never mindless. Every character and dialogue felt meticulously crafted. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an ad man-turned-feature filmmaker, his eye for detail was impossible to miss. After all, when was the last time audiences walked out of a theatre still quoting punchlines years later, or remembering side characters by name?What made him such an exciting filmmaker to follow was his refusal to play safe. After the supernatural satire of Bhooter Bhabishyat, he pivoted to Ascharya Pradip, using a magical lamp to expose the hollow excesses of middle-class consumerism. Then came Borunbabur Bondhu, featuring the late Soumitra Chatterjee, where he stripped away loud humour to tell an intimate story about loneliness, ageing and social phoniness.His cinematic fearlessness peaked with Aparajito. At a time when Bengali cinema itself was dwindling and starved for audiences, releasing a film shot largely in black and white felt like a gamble. Yet week after week, theatres were housefull. The film, a biography of Ray, also stood as a testament to the artistic courage required to create against institutional odds – given it was refused space at Nandan, the very logo of which was designed by Ray himself.What also set Dutta apart was that, at a time when Bengali cinema often leaned heavily on familiar star power, he trusted unassuming faces. He extracted performances that became landmark moments in those actors’ careers. As a viewer, what always struck me was that he seemed to approach casting without preconceived notions. What mattered to him was whether someone belonged truthfully within the world of the film.Today, it feels impossible not to think about the last song he shared on Facebook – Melanie Safka’s What Have They Done to My Song Ma. A deeply personal song by the artiste herself, shared by a filmmaker who, over the years, repeatedly found his own voice challenged and resisted. For those who remember, Bhabishyater Bhoot too had disappeared from theatres overnight, despite releasing across 44 cinema halls, after he publicly called out the “culture of sycophancy” at film festivals. In retrospect, the song feels like the exhaustion of an artiste who understood exactly what it meant to keep speaking in his own voice, even when the room grew uncomfortable with it.As a cine-goer, what makes his absence feel so unsettling today is that we have not merely lost a filmmaker who made us laugh, but one of the few who dared to laugh back at the obnoxious show of power.