‘Brown’, directed by the talented Abhinay Deo, is an uneven lazy adaptation of a mystery novel — Abheek Barua’s ‘City of Death’ — with Karisma Kapoor trying very hard to convince us she is a burnt-out alcoholic detective with a reputation for messing up on the job, and out of it.
What Rita Brown does to her life is what the creators of the series do to the novel.
Since this is Kolkata, the characters tend to burst into Bengali mid-sentence to convince us that the trams and tantrums we see on screen are genuinely Bengali. Rita Brown, as the unsubtle name tells us, belongs to the Anglo-Indian community. She has a mother, Janice (Soni Razdan), whose only function seems to be to remind her daughter that her dinner has been kept on the table. She then goes back to watching her favourite TV show (‘Crime Patrol’?)
Rita’s aunt is interestingly cast: veteran cabaret dancer Helen Khan (she now uses this surname). Helen’s Aunt Bertha is only interested in getting Rita married. But Rita is still married in her head to her dead husband Nitin (singer Shaan), who appears as a ghost intermittently, though not frequently enough. Rita is so ceaselessly sullen, she makes us wonder: does she ever smile (spoiler alert: she does, she does!)? Does Rita ever stop smoking? The cigarillo in her mouth is never extinguished. It is the most alight component of this inert uninteresting series, further lobotomized by Karisma Kapoor’s deadpan detective act. The actress thinks that a scrubbed, no-makeup face and a casual ponytail are sufficient to give character to her character. Not once did I catch Ms Kapoor feeling any of the character’s anguish.
Ironically, Surya Sharma, who plays her colleague Arjun, steals every frame from her. He seems to understand Rita Brown better than Rita Brown herself, which is a measure not just of Sharma’s performing proclivity, but also an indication of the poor writing.
Brown feels so underwritten, it is almost like an Agatha Christie murder mystery with the chutzpah gone missing in action. Rita Brown is not interested in solving a crime that rocks Kolkata. A girl, Ahana Jaiswal, from a well-to-do family is brutally, ritualistically murdered. Her parents (Ajinkya Deo and Meghna Malik) behave as if their daughter has gone off on a picnic with the wrong company.
Mid-way, another murder occurs. Again, Rita Brown tells her colleague Arjun Sinha she is not interested in solving the case. Nobody is. This is a murder mystery with so many red herrings, the actual motive for the murder is buried in hearsay.
Overladen with props and with Kolkata captured in all its decadent glory, ‘Brown’ feels like it could have been a much more engaging crime thriller than it actually is.
The atmosphere is punishingly gloomy and the actors never fail to remind us they are being paid to do what they have to do.
The only cheerful line in this cheerless who-cares whodunit is when Rita Brown tells a co-drinker, “It is a bad omen to say cheers with anything but alcohol.”
Just as much so as a murder mystery which forgets to make itself interesting.
