Boli, OTT platform Hoichoi original TV series, is written by Naseef Faruque Amin, Jaheen Faruque Amin, Rabiul Alam Robi and Sardar Saniat, and stars Chanchal Chowdhury and Shohel Mondol in the lead roles.
Attempting to relay the storyline of Boli is a futile effort because the series, too, forgets what it started out as.
The plot begins with an ageing goon kidnapping a young girl from a brothel in the face of resistance. She dies a day later, but this doesn't seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.
His brother, also a goon, is on the hunt for a boy who inexplicably appears in the area, stricken with a bullet wound and memory loss.
The madame, the brothel's owner, seeks to shield the young boy and avenge the death of the girl by provoking another goon and sleeping with him. Even this is downplayed as the story unfolds, as is her character.
The series can be summarised in a sentence - mature men fighting because they can.
In this overly brutal story, women are reduced to a footnote, nearly always relying on men to save them, sometimes even after their death. This subservience is made more repugnant by the sheer carelessness with which it is crafted.
But, for a series where the story arc of the male characters– who are ostensibly its stars– is so disconnected, any demand from it appears brazen. This is a shame because it has a strong cast, particularly Chanchal Chowdhury, who is reduced to a caricature of a caricature, prone to laughing excessively.
Boli is heavily reliant on action sequences - it is, after all, a criminal series. However, these moments do not appear genuine and the sequences appear fake. There are certain moments in which the frames are out of focus and people speaking are out of frame.
Boli's expertly randomness accounts for most of its incoherence. This is odd because the episodes are backed by a voice-over that serves to hold the story together but imparts knowledge irrelevant to the series.
The show's fault is that it is so void and so far removed from any attempt at world-building, that any attempt to intellectualise it looks accidental. It makes no difference where or when it occurs. There isn't a single frame with enough depth to keep your interest. It's the type of series that neither triggers nor provokes. It just exhausts you, causing you to forget what you remember and reminding you of things you'd rather forget.
'Boli' in Bengali refers to an animal sacrifice conducted to please certain Gods. Given how dull the show is, the only thing that has been sacrificed here is the audiences' time.
Chanchal Chowdhury is the most intriguing and watchable character in Boli. In the series, he is fantastic. Aside from that, the story is good.
Nonetheless, most of the scenes are overly long and unnecessary. It's interesting at first but gradually loses momentum, devolving into a jumble of a presentation with little rhyme or sense.
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