Jazz City Review: Over-Ambitious Historical Fiction

Jazz City could have been enjoyable had it not been so densely over-plotted and unevenly executed, notes Deepa Gahlot.

What Jazz City is about

If inspiration is to strike, why not pick up the best idea?

Soumik Sen's series Jazz City owes a tiny debt to the classic Casablanca. His version of the cynical Rick Blaine is the hustler Jimmy Roy (Arifin Shuvoo),whose comfortable existence is also undone by the reappearance of a past love.

Jimmy has wiped out his own background as a refugee from across the border, and runs a nightclub called Jazz City where the city's elite come to drink and ogle the resident singer Pam (Alexandra Taylor), who comes up with awful lyrics and is always seen walking down the stars in slinky gowns (she sews them herself, another pointless detail in a show stuffed with non-sequiturs).

The time is just before the Bangladesh War, when a trickle of refugees from East Pakistan has started crossing into India -- one that became a deluge later.

Sheela Bose (Sauraseni Maitra) visits the club one evening, Jimmy's heart does a flip and he gets pulled into her work with the starving refugees. His reputation as a fixer -- do something Jimmyish, people say -- gets the attention of an intelligence officer, Sinha (Santanu Ghatak), who twists his arm into doing his bidding, by cancelling the club's liquor license.

What Sinha drags him in for was something the government could easily have accomplished, the cloak and dagger stuff was not needed. The bullying of a white engineer is just plain silly, he could just have been assigned the job. Some of the subterfuge is believable, but there are long sequences to pad up the 10-long episodes. Like Jimmy haring off across the border to get a formula to cure cholera, which any grandmother could have told him.

The politics of Jazz City

Three Bangladeshi students on the run are hunted by Pakistani agents, for no big reason. They are abducted in one scene and quickly rescued by Jimmy in the next.

The Pakistani villains are represented by the cruel Colonel Hanif (Shataf Figar), whose Operation Searchlight causes mass murder and rape in East Pakistan. He has also planted undercover agents in Calcutta, who walk around and kill with impunity, while the R&AW need a Jimmy, who they admit is an 'upstart, liar, fixer,' to do their dirty work.

The East Pakistani locals are concerned not just about the corpses in the street, but the eradication of their language and culture. Good ol' Jimmy is the catalyst in geting the proof of the genocide reaching the media, that leads to India's involvement in the war with Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Real characters like Awami League leader Mujibur Rahman (Kaushik Banerjee), Pakistan's Yahya Khan (Saubik Majumdar), Indira Gandhi (Alokika Dey), even then US president Richard M Nixon (Edward Eccleston) and Henry Kissinger (Gautam Vir Prasad) make appearances in the show. The politics may be more or less accurate, but the script ties itself up in knots.

What works, and what doesn't

Jimmy's devotion to Sheela makes him risk his life for her, but there is no spark between them. His sneaky manager Rambahadur (Sayandeep Sengupta) and Pam have more chemistry. Some characters pop up and vanish, like an overeager cop hassling Jimmy or a priest intoning solemnly. There is a lot of stopping the action to let someone or the other make a theatrical speech (the series is in Bengali with some English and Hindi).

The scale and ambition of Jazz City are admirable.

When Bangladesh is trying to wipe out the legacy of Mujib and India's contribution in the country's independence from the oppressive Pakistani regime, this could serve as a reminder. Not just the military, but ordinary Bengalis and Indians stepped up to help the brutalised people of East Pakistan.

Arifin Shuvoo, who had played Sheikh Mujib in Shyam Benegal's biopic, enters the Bogart-ish spirit of Jimmy, dressed in natty suits, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke, the scar on his chin giving him an air of mystery as the 'nobody who had the courage to become a somebody' as a voiceover informs.

Santanu Ghatak as the keen spymaster and Jimmy's handler brings to the show the energy needed to jumpstart it every time it flags.

Sauraseni Maitra contributing grace and a wardrobe of lovely saris to the series, seems like the third angle of the Jimmy-Sinha connection.

Jazz City could have been enjoyable had it not been so densely over-plotted and unevenly executed.

Jazz City streams on SonyLIV.

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