I took my sweet time writing and publishing this honest review. After all the people in the film industry work really hard to make films, and critiquing their efforts like Gordon Ramsay might in a reality show such as “filmmaking nightmares,” as soon as their work is released, is frankly inconsiderate. “Surongo” was released on June 29, which gave it ample time to prove in the Box office, whether it will be critically acclaimed or not. I humbly think it will not.
In this piece, I, a nonentity, will frankly write my feelings on Mr Rafi's latest “film.” Since I am not as popular as a writer, team “Surongo” need not fear.
My first thought on “Surongo” is that if you are tired of the usual clichés and predictable plots in mainstream Bangladeshi cinema, then this film is Schrödinger's cat of clichés. It shows the story of a guy madly in love with a girl, who is madly in love with money. So, the classic plot of a gold-digger ruining the lives of men is one line, to sum up the plot. However, “Surongo” gives an M Night Shyamalan-esque twist at the end. So, the film is both bad and even worse at the end.
In my completely infamous opinion, “Surongo” mainly suffers from a bad script. I am not saying that I can write better film scripts, or any scripts for that matter, but with the liberty of being one of the millions of know-it-all nobodies who share their feelings on creative content they consume on media, I am saying the film suffers from a really bad script.
It starts off with a romantic vibe showing the falling in love, and then marriage between an electrician named Masud and a girl called Moyna, but soon Moyna starts pressuring Masud to buy her more new clothes. She does this while shampooing his hair on a river bank which has their dilapidated house. As if a woman in such a context only cares about new clothes. A cliché and not a cliché indeed!
Eventually, Moyna pressures Masud to leave the country and go to Malaysia to earn more for her new clothes. However, she quickly gets into an affair with her husband's land contractor friend Jahir, who, while giving her money from her husband in Malaysia, would also give her expensive groceries and jewellery. A classic homage to Bangladesh's classic “situationship” where “shami bidesh” (affair resulting from husband living abroad). One stormy night the affair begins like you have seen or read many times in the past, where extramarital affairs begin due to rain and storm. However, the affair starts with Jahir comically falling in the mud during rain, which led him to require a bath in the house of Moyna. Again, a cliché and not a cliché indeed!
Anyways, the affair continues and Moyna elopes with Jahir, and Masud comes back to an empty home. He is completely downcast as he is riddled with debts, which prompts him to sell his dilapidated house on the river bank. By now the Bangladeshi audience around me is suffering from confirmation bias towards gold-diggers and that they ruin the lives of hard-working men. I naively thought this was probably the end of the cliché gold digger trope.
However, Masud does manage to find Moyna, and to woo her decides to rob a bank by digging a tunnel, the eponymous “Surongo.” To the director's credit, he does show some minimal plot developments to justify Masud's expertise at digging tunnels, by showing the protagonist convincing one of his many employers during his search for Moyna, that he can dig a well. That was the extent of the plot development to show Masud's transformation from an electrician to an expert tunnel worker.
If anyone says that he got the experience from working in Malaysia, the film clearly showed him working there as an electric welder. I mean there is only so much you can leave to the audience's imagination while making films. It is a good technique, where great filmmakers leave gaps in the story to make the viewers think and connect the dots. As a viewer of “Surongo” however, I was lost in the labyrinthine tunnel the scriptwriter left me in, and had to figuratively break the mountainous walls of disbelief to connect gaps in the pathway this story was progressing on.
Moyna eventually gets wooed again by the promise of unlimited money that Masud gives by blatantly sharing his master plan of tunnel-digging-robbing a bank over the phone with her. Moyna decides to leave Jahir, as he turned out to be a serial “family maker,” who had a previous marriage and is trying to make a new one while already balancing two families. Yet, Moyna's switch of allegiance to Masud due to the promise of money is so blatantly shown, that once again the misogynists in the film theatre started cheering.
Moyna's evil deeds as a pure gold digger do not end there. The bank gets robbed, and Masud is unreachable. Police announce reward money to get leads on him. Moyna and Jahir go to the police to identify Masud, as she wants to divide the reward money with her serial family man. She even contacts Masud and helps the police catch him, to betray him once again. The misogynists in the theatre are again full of raucous cheers and excitedly whispering to each other their confirmation bias about “women only wanting money.”
And then the film starts progressing fast like in the third act of Shyamalan films to reach its twist ending. I will not share the twist here, as I hope the film will still make money for its cast and crew, who really worked hard.
Despite the cliché script, the cast did a commendable job, and Shahiduzzaman Selim really stole the show with his acting. Afran Nisho, Tama Mirza, and Mostafa Monwar, the actors portraying the three principal roles did a good job, of revelling in the evilness of their respective characters. The sound editing and music accompanying different scenes in the film was also top-notch.
Another thing I did like about the film is the scenes depicting the extra-marital affair between Moyna and Jahir. They were not artsy like European films or US arthouse films, but they work. Turns out the biggest complaints about the film from the Bangladeshi audience are the explicit scenes, as shown by TV channel interviews on the day of the release, as the parents foolishly took their children to the theatre with them to watch a film titled “Surongo.” Lack of proper film censorship rating aside, I personally think parents should be responsible enough to do a minimum of research while picking a film to watch with their family. Then again, what do I know?
Secondly, the explicit scenes in the “Surongo” were the only thing shown realistically. For sure there are stories of bank robberies happening through tunnels in Bangladesh, and electricians having multiple skills, but those robberies had a group of people planning and working in those heists. And jack of all trades electricians still have to spend enough time to become jacks in those multiple trades. In comparison to the Bangladeshi films of the recently “gone” dark ages, where explicit scenes meant a severe case of throat fetish, from the school of Shah Rukh Khan's explicit scene acting, “Surongo” shows the scenes in a remarkably realistic way. Watch it yourself to assess it. Just do not take your children. Let's hope the explicit scenes of “Surongo” herald a new dawn in the sex scenes of Bangladesh's film industry.
Last thoughts on the message received from the film, “clichés are good. Gold-digging is really, really bad.”