Vampire Diaries:
A large chunk of content on Indian streaming platforms remains in such a narrow circle of crime and comedy, that when a show breaks out of it, the effort needs to be applauded, even if it is derivative, uneven, and often downright absurd.
Pratim Dasgupta’s Tooth Pari : When Love Bites (on Neflix) is inspired by Western vampire tales, but he has suitably Indianised it (the hybrid title), or rather, Bengali-fied it, setting it in Kolkata that is divided into two levels—Upar, where normal people live, and the subterranean caves of Neeche, inhabited by the undead, who survive on human blood. They cannot go out into the sunlight, and, in keeping with vampire myths, are repelled by garlic and silver; the only way they can be killed is by decapitation. The word used for them is ‘darinda’ or monster, though they seem like a happy, well-dressed bunch, controlled by a human called AD (Adil Hussain), as their leader Ora (Anish Railkar) hibernates.
Rumi (Tanya Maniktala) is a rebel, who makes furtive trips Upar (always in trendy outfits) to sink her teeth into human necks to suck fresh blood, and bring back supplies for her friends that include Sreela (Anindita Bose), David (Saswata Chatterjee) and Meera (Tillotama Shome)—the last a languid, Uru-speaking courtesan from a past so distant that she refers to being around at the time of the Battle of Plassey.
On one such expedition, Rumi loses a ‘sharpie’– that retractable canine used to draw blood. Before she can be caught and punished, she must find a dentist to fix the tooth. She visits the clinic of sweet, bumbling Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari), who belongs to that breed of passive sons bullied by their fathers and pampered by their mothers, which leaves them with no personality of their own. Roy would rather have been a chef, but dentistry is the family profession and he is given no choice. He falls for her beauty, she for his innocence and also, initially, for his rare ‘virigin blood.’
Meanwhile Upar is buzzing with activity— Badshah (Chitrak Bandopadhyay), the man whose neck broke Rumi’s tooth, files a police complaint and sub inspector Kartik Pal (Sikander Kher) is roused from his alcoholic slumber. He is the son of disgraced cop, Biren Pal (Anjan Dutt), who had claimed to have encountered vampires rampaging through the city, during tge Naxalite era, for which he was labelled mad and shunned.
There is also a band of vampire slayers called Cutmundus, led by a Wiccan Luna Luka (Revathy), who manage to trap and kill Sreela, whose headless body spontaneously combusts, and now Kartik knows something strange is afoot and starts investigating in earnest. Then he encounters Rumi and falls for her too, believing Roy is the vampire. Roy’s parents (Swaroopa Ghosh-Rajatava Dutta), charmed by Rumi, are planning his wedding.
Things get crazier and more complicated, and the eight-episode series has many flashbacks, detailed and pointless backstories, too much information and needless characters (like AD’s family and his ghoulish business, and an old Jewish confidante), so the unlikely romance is lost underneath the frenzy. Plots are often dismissed as half-baked, this one (written by Dasgupta, Sambit Mishra and Nandini Gupta) is charred by over-cooking.
Sikander Kher walks away with the acting honours, when the cast is chocabloc with well-known actors, many of them Bengali, who do not mangle the mixed Bangla-Hindi-English dialogue and look like they belong to the milieu. Shantanu Maheshwari and Tanya Maniktala make an attractive pair, but their love story is actually the least engaging in the show because attention is pulled away by other subplots.
Kolkata, shot by night (Subhankar Bhar) looks far more gleamingly attractive, the old mansions beautiful even in their decripitude, compared to the weird set of Neeche or Roy’s strange-looking clinic. The visual effects are passable, and because the tone is kept as light as possible the gore is not sickening. However, the compulsion to always be amusing takes away from the Twilight-like aching tenderness of the love story, or the shock-horror of the vampire genre. By the ending, it looks like there’s more to come—Netflix is not done with the series, that is obviously meant to pull in a young audience familiar with the conventions and jargon of vampire lore.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
