Review | 'November Story': Who cares whodunit when why-they-dun-it is painfully slow?

Episode two is when things start picking up. There is a body and a very obvious cover-up (and why my head sings the theme from James Bond’s Goldfinger - you will have to see the show to understand).

Seven episodes down I have to ask myself, did it have to be Tamannaah? Could it be anyone else? If her bestie earned that contract to data entry all the FIRs for the police department, how come he has no computer skills at all? How come his team of data entry people are constantly asking him what to do if the computers are ‘frozen’?

‘Power off the computers and start them again!’ is what I yelled at the screen. It’s just data entry for goodness sakes! Why did the hacker just not ask for the files physically by bribing a cop or steal them (who would miss one file from the piles of dusty files sitting there?), or photograph the information just like a normal person would? Why wait for a data entry project to start and then hack that one file? That’s too much disbelief to suspend.

Back to the good idea that the show started with: a writer of crime novels is implicated in a crime, but he has Alzheimer's, so his daughter has to prove his innocence. The show does everything to keep you away from this. It introduces strange childhood memories that are worth every penny you could donate to the chap who invented the ten-second fast-forward button on the app.

The show has a whole range of cops that makes me want to scream ‘cliche!’. From the voice of the ACP who ‘needs an arrest now!’ to the investigating officer who acts like he’s in some high school spy play and he needs to win all accolades. At one point the cop-in-charge forces the force at his disposal to debate the pros and cons of the case while he wears a lungi and vest at the police station. Who does that? Short of getting the two sides - one thinks the crime writer is the murderer and the other bunch thinks someone else is - into a fist fight, everything happens. And yes, there’s a cop who falls asleep just when the breakthrough happens. That’s the cop who is lowest on the rungs so gets ignored.

I wish I had not finished seeing Mare Of Easttown on the same DisneyPlusHotstar platform just a couple of days before. That show also has a woman cop who is the central figure, and even though it has cliched characters (a drunk lad, sneaky teenagers, dead girls, missing girls, husbands who have adulterous relationships, a priest with a history of rape and yes, a police chief who will assert his authority by asking for ‘gun and badge’), there is not a single moment where you wish you hadn’t started watching the show.

The series makers are well aware of how and why they’re dragging November Story over years and years. The bad guy announces his interest in the case for no reason at all, he looks shifty right from the start and does not at any point make you think that he may be a red herring. He just looks and acts guilty.

The series reminded me of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Elippathayam (The Rat Trap) where the story of a decaying household is told using the metaphor of a rat caught in a trap that needs to be drowned. The filmmaker shows us over and over how a person carries the rat trap (with the rat) from the house to the water to drown the vermin in real time, but that is art. Here, when the man is alone on duty at the mortuary, he just waits for the phone to ring six times before getting up and slowly walking up to the phone to answer it. Then when he hears an accident has happened and they would be bringing the bodies in, he puts the phone down and then slowly walks out into the rain. Excruciating.

Most of the time Tamannaah has to sit down and think about what is happening. This is the first time I miss the cops who stick photos on a soft board and connect events and things with a red twine… She is so involved with her dad, she won’t report for duty at the police station. If I knew how to stop a hacker from accessing the data at the crime bureau, and I had to take care of my father who’s suffering from a debilitating disease, then I would work from home. She’s shown travelling by train to and from work. And speaking of trains, when a train is that crowded, how come she gets a place to sit down?

Why am I nitpicking? Because they do not explore the possibility of the crime writer committing a crime, they just turn him into an old paavam guy, sometimes violent, but murder, not possible. Would have been more fun had he really murdered in his moments of lucidity and then forgotten about it…

Why am I nitpicking? Because my head hurts from the incessant mood music that plays from the beginning of the first episode until the end credits of the seventh episode. Yes you will hear the wheels of the hospital stretcher clacking frantically, but even then the music does not stop! And I am amazed how people-less the neighbourhood Tamannaah lives in is. No nosy neighbour, no beggars sleeping on the street, no chaiwallah on the night round, nothing! Even as Tamannaah leaves the house on her scooter, frantically calling out for her ‘appa’, no lights come on, no one helps her, not a peep from anyone… except there is the non-stop music.

I so wanted November Story to be a great view. So I could say, hey, our Tamannaah is not just the best navel in tinseltown, but her acting is as good as Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, but I end up saying, ‘Why, Yeshu ... I mean ... Jesus, why?’