What did one vampire say to another hovering over the body of their prey lying prone? ‘What are you waiting for? Consent?’ That more or less sets the tone for what is to follow in Pratim Dasgupta’s Tooth Pari, streaming on Netflix. That, and the snatch of a song as the opening credits roll. I do not trust my ears at first. Surely, not this. So I play back. And sure enough there is SD Burman’s sonorous voice crooning Rongila rongila re. I perk up. Well, that would be a first for a series on vampires. A little later, the shy, self-effacing dentist at the centre of this show puts on a vinyl playing the same song in his chambers while attending to a patient. Definitely, another first (my dentist of years prefers instrumental, The Shadows and James Last to be precise).
Over the next 40-odd minutes of the first episode, the makers create a colourful world – both visually and aurally – that might be a first for an Indian film or web series. Despite being a veteran viewer of this genre – the horror, spoofy or hardcore scary – there are words and sights I have not encountered before: deep-hyp, sharpies, baaghinis, hibernation pods, cutmundus, blood bars. And names – those names: Ora, Luna Luka, Adi Dev. The puns flow thicker and faster than the blood from the vampire bites. Imagine vampires complaining about blood in plastic bags from blood banks. Or being conscientious enough about not sucking too much blood. Or the delicious reversal of cinematic cliches: a man hits upon a lonely woman at a bar. They check into a room before long. There’s just the sense of something not quite right about the scene, apart from the fact that this is either an unbelievably naive or adventurous girl. Sure enough, in the room, things take a turn for the macabre, with emerging fangs and a bloody neck. Only then does it dawn that, well, we might have been worrying about the wrong person here. It is the man who was being naive and adventurous.
And then. Nothing.
Over the next seven episodes, I keep waiting for the narrative to move beyond world building and smart one-liners. In vain. Tooth Pari is one long tease, frustrating, and in the end making you want to throw up your hand in despair. In one of the latter episodes, the vampire, slyly referring to an unfulfilling sexual encounter, says: ‘He failed to rise to the occasion.’ The writers not only seem unaware of how tired and unfunny that expression is, they are also oblivious about how the show fails to rise to the expectations raised by the subject and its first quarter of an hour.
Which is kind of sad for a number of reasons. One, Pratim Dasgupta is a filmmaker whose works – from Paanch Adhyay to Machher Jhol to Ahare Mon and Love Aaj Kal Porshu – I admire. In each of his outings, he has shown a good ear for the quirky turn of phrase, backed by content that is truly different. If anyone had it in them to deliver a fantastical tale like this, it is him. Given his experience as a fine film critic and filmmaker, he also has a wealth of international references at his fingertips. If anyone is equipped to marry the Western concept of the blood-sucking vampire with homegrown lore, it is Pratim.
And he has Kolkata. No city lends itself to a tale of ghosts and other creatures of the night like Calcutta does. Just sample the shot of a tram somewhere in this muddle – if ever there is a relic from the past which screams ‘haunted’, it is the tram, and Pratim’s composition here evokes that so well. Also, in the many tales of bhoot-pret-daini-shakchunni that Bengali folklore is replete with, he has a storehouse of material. Why, even the Goddess Kali is unlike any mainstream god anywhere. We even have the protagonist here being garlanded with hibiscus flowers, the jaba so beloved of the goddess, and the reference is unmistakable, the possibilities unimaginable.
In Tooth Pari, however, it is almost as if Pratim and his co-writers are too enamoured of their ability to make a pun of every conceivable situation. So that the series seems like an endless exercise in wannabe witticisms. Most of which fall flat because there is nothing to hang the peg of quips on. How many different ways can you refer to a dentist – datoon, dantmanjan and so on and so forth? How many references can you have to a character’s virginity and hence pure blood without it beginning to get anaemic? In another show with better control, a dialogue between potential parents-in-law where one mother asks another whether the boy and girl getting engaged are ‘hum-bistars’ would be a scream. Here, it only had me groaning, oh, not again (we have already had these gems: ‘what you haven’t lost, others may find’; ‘clinic mein bechara, bistar mein kunwara’; and after the character has lost it, this: ‘virgin blood is no longer limited edition’ – what is that supposed to mean anyway?). Suspension of disbelief is a given in any work in this genre, but what do you make of the sequence where a patient on the dentist’s chair starts singing ‘Je raatein mor duaar guli’, stopping at ‘more’ and sighing ‘more pain’.
One can go on and on about the many misfires – because this is a show that overflows with them. A character is called Badshah, and there are at least five puns around his name: ‘Be a good shah’; ‘Bad ko baad dao’, ‘sirf shah’. You get the drift. One can almost imagine being a fly on the wall when these were being written… the high-fiving and backslapping with each juvenile ‘You’re killing it, man’ joke. Heck, the director even has a dialogue punning on his film, Ahare Mon.
Tucked away in between are attempts to blend fantasy with real life. The Emergency is invoked. As is the Naxal unrest in 1970s Kolkata, with a vampire attack on a police station making it to the newspapers as a Naxal strike. You also have a pharma company (a Chinese one at that) profiteering on booster doses and potential miracle medicines. There are delightful possibilities here. As are there in the attempts to weave in inclusivity and address gender bias. But all of these are either executed in a ham-handed manner (in this day and age, do we really need to be told that cooking is not the domain of women?) or undone by the poor taste of the jokes that make a point. Just one example. A female vampire has this to say about a man who once wooed her: ‘If one has to make do with one weapon all life, it better be a rifle and not a pistol.’ Pratim, you can do better.
I love broad comedy. Mel Brooks made a career of it, spoofing genres in Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Dracula Dead and Loving It, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and many others. And I am sure the only way Tooth Pari could work is as an over-the-top comedy because the meet-cute romance surely doesn’t with its two deadwood lead performers. But there’s a difference between what’s funny and what’s plain fatuous. A character yelling ‘holy mackerel, tilapia, barracuda, barramundi’ after tasting ‘200 per cent virgin blood’ is definitely not funny. In the absence of anything substantial, the jokes wear thin fast, and seldom bite. And there’s no way even the powerhouse performers on display – Revathy, Tillottama Shome, Adil Hussain, and almost every big name in Bengali cinema you can think of, Saswata Chatterjee, Rajatava Dutta, Anirban Chakrabarti, Barun Chanda and Anjan Dutt – can salvage this mess.
Speaking of Bengali stars, what’s with the weaving of Bengali in the dialogues? Like the rest of the show, which does not quite know what it wants to be – comedy, romance, spoof, gothic – the characters break into Bengali every now and then. In a way that’s hilariously unfunny. The way some of the dialogues play out, I can almost hear the punchline in Bengali. ‘Ora kara?’ asks someone. Now, Ora is a character in the film. That question works in Bengali bigtime. Definitely not how it plays out here. But I guess this is a Hindi show. So, what is it with all the Bengali bits? A Bengali family – father, mother and son – will never, ever break mid-conversation from Bengali to Hindi. Bengali to English, yes. But never something like, ‘Baba shona, tomar Baba shokale tumko dhoond rahe thay.’ That’s how ridiculous it sounds. That’s how ridiculous it is.
After 360 minutes of Tooth Pari, I am in need of some deep-hyp.
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)
