8/10
Doob: a refreshing experience from contemporary Bangla cinema
1 November 2017
When you look at the big screen inside the huge dark auditorium, after the very moment, when light gets off, you start to expect many thing from the screen. You demand with your own aesthetics and sensibilities, you judge with your own sense of value judgement and morality, you try to get hold of things which are there on screen. A review is nothing but the subjective interpretation of these expectations, where, this title and this review is nothing exceptional.

Going back to the main question, what do you expect from a movie? I can't answer any other's statements as deeply as I can answer my own. I expect a movie to be "A Movie" at first, everything else is less important to me. Obviously that doesn't mean that a film is showing genocide in a very artistic way and my mode of reception is positive with the film. The problem with any kind of afterthought is that this is bound to be subjective, and the dangerous debate and miscommunication which is happening in Bangladesh now, is utterly unnecessary and 'cinema-less', if not unexpected and regressive. "Doob" is a fascinating movie experience for me. After a long time finally I've succeeded to speak for a contemporary industry-produced 'Bangla' movie whole heartedly. We know the sort of pros and cons of working within the heinous circle of any film industry, but, I've to appreciate the major mature steps which Farooki took in the course of making this movie.

Aesthetically, most of the time the movie relied on a very subtle tone and an intimate texture. There are no extra scenes or running motions within the sequence. (Though he can't retain this mature treatment throughout the movie) There are lots of pause and spaces, as the basic human relationships and emotions are. We cannot rush up everything in our 'real' mode of relationships, why should we continuously cut back and forth within one scene and destroy the spatial continuity of the 'realistic' cinema? 'Doob' respects the space between two people, the pause, the subtle gaze, the loss of words. It doesn't try to rush up everything with a single aim to tell the story. In other words, "Doob" adopts an aesthetic to create the story, rather than telling everything in a running mode.

Obviously there are flaws. Which work of art is perfect in the world? But it is the positive power of the film that it can engage the viewer with a serious mode of communication, one wants to forget about the problematic parts soon after watching the movie.

Finally the debate concerning the morality and the 'biopic-like' aspects of this movie, is, at least to me, an utter bullshit. Film, as any other serious art form, offers a parallel world of reality, which should be judged only with its own aesthetics and language. As far as this movie in concerned, it is an extraordinary piece of work which have managed to be a 'film' in the true sense of the term. Everything else (namely, the morality, biopic-like assumptions and other nonsense) doesn't matter at all.
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