Quick notes on Jazz City

I won’t pretend to be “objective” about anything that Soumik Sen (writer, director, showrunner, musician, many other things) does. We have been friends for a long time, we had some very invigorating (and irreverent) conversations about cinema and literature in the Business Standard dungeon office a thousand years ago, and it’s been inspirational to see how he made things happen for himself after moving to Bombay and bringing some of his countless ideas to the screen (while there must also have been many setbacks and disillusionments along the way).

All that said, I watched the full 10 episodes of his new series Jazz City because I was engaged by it, not out of a sense of loyalty. I was slightly handicapped at first by not knowing enough about the churning history of East Pakistan/Bangladesh (and not having direct emotional investment in the Bengali-nationalism theme), but the storytelling here – bringing the personal and the political together, while moving between Calcutta and East Pakistan in the late 60s/early 70s – made it easy to figure things out.

Arifin Shuvoo is very good and charismatic in the lead – and his Jimmy Roy grows in stature as the show progresses. But there wasn’t really a weak link in the main performances. (I could have done without the guttural, platitude-spouting priest – a character who needed less philosophy and more cough syrup. As I jokingly told Soumik, I’m glad he didn’t cast himself in that role.)

Given a conversation that Soumik and I had in Calcutta a few weeks ago, I think he also managed to be fairly restrained in depicting the brutalities of the Operation Searchlight genocide. I’m not sure if that was wokish self-censorship or peer pressure at play (since any film or series that depicts extreme Islamist violence tends to get jumped on by Indian “liberals” these days), or just the need to keep the gore quotient down for a mainstream series. Either way, I think it was a good tightrope walk.

The show *did* slacken a bit for me in the middle episodes (a point where it is increasingly possible to ask, of many such 10-episode shows: Did it need to be so stretched out?), but it picked up really well in the end, as all the threads started to come together – I watched the last three episodes pretty much at one go, which is rare for me.

Jazz City is on Sony Liv. If you watch it, please select the original Bengali audio. (There is a fair amount of English, Urdu and Hindi on that track too.)