Justin here with a look at two documentaries I saw over the weekend at the Starz Denver Film Festival, Solar Eclipse and The Bengali Detective.
Documentaries are a tricky thing. In any documentary I see, I expect some amount of staging and direction from the part of the director. This faking bothers a lot of people. From my perspective, since it’s a given it doesn’t really bother me as long as it isn’t interfering with or undermining the story. So then we have two documentaries, Solar Eclipse and The Bengali Detective.
Solar Eclipse is very much a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It chronicles two electrical engineers, Thomas and Milan, from the Czech Republic on a humanitarian mission to Zambia. Their job is to make repairs to a solar system they installed 4 years before. The doc appears to have been shot by one person with a digital camera. The subjects speak directly to the cameraman/director and even comment on being subjects a couple of times.
Solar Eclipse had a sitcom like quality to it. A typical scene involves the two rolling up to a house to fix the energy problems. Since the last time they were there, some supposed “expert” had fixed and rigged the system to be dangerous and nonsensical. The Czechs have a profanity laced conversation about how stupid the situation is and then have a less confrontational conversation with the Zambians in pigeon-English. There’s really no overriding message or point to the movie, it was just extremely interesting to watch Thomas and Milan solve a series of bizarre problems and to watch two foreign cultures interact. Recommended.
The Bengali Detective, on the other hand, was much slicker and staged for the camera. The premise of that movie is that the Indian criminal justice system is extremely ineffective; 70% of murder cases, for instance, go unsolved. Therefore a lot of people hire private detectives. Enter Rajesh Ji, the head detective of the “Always Detectives” agency. Rajesh and company don’t look much like detectives, private or otherwise. Through the course of the movie, they investigate 3 cases, a murder, an extramarital affair, and a counterfeit shampoo ring. Meanwhile on their days off, the Always Detectives love to dance. They train with a chorographer to be on a dance competition TV show.
While I liked The Bengali Detective overall, I did have some reservations. A lot of scenes were reenactments or outright stagings, as the director would film people as they were calling the detectives for the first time. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t extremely bothered by this, it just ended up taking me out of the narrative. A later scene where they delivered the results of their affair investigation to the woman who hired them felt like an episode of Cheaters India. The dance scenes were really cute and humanizing, but it was impossible to shake a kind of Napolean Dynamite style exploitation of these guys who don’t look like dancers. The general attitude of the filmmakers to their subjects seemed to vary wildly between, “isn’t it amazing that these guys are on the verge of cracking a baffling murder case, they’re performing an essential service,” and “Isn’t it funny watching these chubby guys dance and pretend to be detectives?”
There is a lot to like in The Bengali Detective, and I do think the majority of people will find a lot to like here. The characters are really engaging, and there were some very heartfelt moments watching Rajeesh’s interactions with his son and dying wife. Hang-ups on the authenticity of Bengali Detective aside, it’s entertaining, interesting and somewhat affecting.