In a Shakespearean tragedy, one cannot but get sucked into the emotional cauldron. Be it Othello or King Lear or Macbeth or Hamlet, its all about great emotional upheaval when it comes to the core of the Bard’s plays. In Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear, Amitabh Bachchan’s (as well as most of the cast’s) first full-fledged English role, Harish ‘Harry’ Mishra too is a character full of Shakespearean pathos. Quite naturally, it is but natural to expect that Harry’s character would draw you in with its raw emotional power.

Strangely, it does not happen, except in sporadic scenes. It is hard to say who is at fault – Bachchan or the script. Bachchan gives a performance that is one of his best, but even though there have been raving reports about this being his best-ever performance, there is actually nothing much that takes forward his histrionics from the point where he stood while doing Black.

Bachchan the star’s mannerisms threaten to peep through Harry occasionally, though to his credit, he has been able to hold them back to a great extent. We have seen so much of Big B the star that anything he does that does not fall in the category of the Bollywood hero (even when he plays the father of the hero, well, he is the ‘hero’, right?) makes us squeal in delight about it being a “groundbreaking” performance.

Harry’s is a character full of pathos – he suddenly left the stage at his prime when he was just a week away from doing his best role of King Lear, he lives almost a recluse, only shouting from the first-floor window of his Kolkata house at strangers urinating on the boundary wall. For him, nothing exists beyond the Bard, and cinema – well, it cannot even come near theatre. And when he does his first film, rather persuaded to do so by a serious director who gets to him through a journalist friend, he does it with great suspicion about the capabilities of film as a medium. But he slowly changes, adjusting to the needs of the medium, but still remaining a worshipper of the stage. As he says, “I’ll be good, simply because I cannot be bad, but your cinema won’t be good and that would make me look like a fool.”

Quite simply, it should have been a performance that you would carry with you forever, like you do Kamalahasan’s in Sadma, Dilip Kumar’s in Mughal-e-Azam or Naya Daur, Guru Dutt’s in Pyasa….. but except in patches, you fail to connect with the emotions of this Harry. You feel like getting one with him, but somehow it does not happen. Except when a dead-drunk Harry grovels before the director to allow him to perform a dangerous stunt, his Shakespearean accent giving way to Bengali-accented English, or when he teaches the model-turned-actress Shabnam (Preity Zinta) about finer nuances of acting, or when in the finale, he responds only to text written by the Bard himself.

I can only imagine how Utpal Dutt, who had written the play Aajker Shahjahan (Today’s Emperor) on which the film is based, and in which he had played the title role, would have brought alive the character on stage. Or, how stage masters like Naseeruddin Shah would have interpreted the character on screen. Here, you just feel like applauding Bachchan for taking up a role that is so different from what he has been essaying all these years, and for nothing much else. Stage actors like Adil Hussain and Barry John have done much better justice to characters weaned out of Shakespeare’s creations in Roysten Abel’s much-awarded play Shakespeare’s Othello In Black & White.

Instead of Bachchan, who seems to be taking away all the pre-release, media-driven accolade, have a look at Shefali Shah, as Vandana, the companion of Harry. A brilliantly-controlled performance is what she has delivered, as the woman who is utterly bitter at the way things have gone, and then slowly exposes her tender side as Shabnam and she discusses Harry over the night. Arjun Rampal, as Siddharth the serious film director, and Divya Dutta as Ivy the nurse are adequate, and just that. Jishu Sengupta, as Gautam the journalist, through whose voice the story unfolds, seems to be trying to hard to look intense, while Prosenjit as the co-actor in The Mask, the film in which Harry plays the protagonist, does not have much to do. Zinta surprises too, with her measured performance without allowing the usual bubbly self to emerge at all.

Ghosh’s film, however, has quite a few heroes in the technical department – as usual Abhik Mukhopadhyay (here his surname appears as ‘Mukherjee’) is in his elements is capturing the details of the characters and their surroundings, editing by Arghya Kamal Mitra is able to make the film interesting despite its slow pace, sound design by another Ghosh regular Biswadeep Chatterjee matches the other technical aspects and music by Raja Narayan Deb and Sanjoy Das is non-intrusive.

On the website of the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was screened last year, the film’s synopsis describes Bachchan’s as a master class in acting, and says like Richard Burton, Toshiro Mifune or other larger-than-life greats, he demands to be watched. Well…..