840: The story of the mayor Dablu or someone else

Political satire is one of the least explored genres in our entertainment arena. However, director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki has created the most popular political satire.

I think '420' is one of the most popular ones until now. After 17 years of '420', Farooki has come up with its sequel—not on television, this time. It's a feature film, '840', also known as 'Democracy Private Limited'.

The film narrates the story of Kaji Dablu, the mayor of Phoolmonirhat town, who has been in office for the past 10 years. The story starts when the next mayoral election is knocking on the door, and Dablu gets stuck in a murder case.

Kaji Dablu, an autocratic mayor, does everything a proper autocratic ruler should do, from doing sting operations to spying on the people's mobile phones through an app named 'Nagar Sheba', vandalising minorities' places, inhumanizing citizens, killing the opposition party members, everything.

But when we watch the film, Mayor Dablu isn't the mayor Dablu we know; he is someone else. Any conscious audience will understand what Dablu Farooki narrated.

When Dablu says, "Who gave you electricity? Who gave you gas?" "I am near the area; I'll be in the town anytime." Even the viral conversation between Dablu and Milon, "Dablu: I paid so much attention to development, why doesn't anyone love me? Milon: You give them five-star life, they won't like it. They will want democracy. People have bad taste, sir."—everything resembles some of the real-world incidents.

When something happens on the screen, a conscious audience member must experience a flashback in his head. It feels like it happened earlier, somewhere else, not on the screen.

As the film trailer said,' Let's see the country through a town.' Phoolmonirhat successfully becomes a metaphor for the country, making the film more accurate and less fictional.

The most overwhelming thing about the movie is that there were many good moments where the audience laughed a lot. The audience could relate it to the real world and laughed out loud.

A star-studded cast gave the film an extra point. Nasir Uddin Khan was indeed the perfect casting for Kaji Dablu. The Dablu character had a few shades throughout the film: funny, brutal, egotistical, clever, and helpless. Nasir Uddin Khan was excellent throughout the film.

Fazlur Rahman Babu, Zakia Bari Mamo, and Marzuk Russell were precise with their roles. But Shahriar Nazim Joy needed to be more satisfactory, and the minor characters needed to improve. The surprising cast of Zayed Khan couldn't add any remarkable value to the film.

One of the film's underwhelming aspects was the use of background music (BGM). Listening to the BGM, it seems like something big is going to happen, but nothing remarkable actually happens. Some scenes and dialogue in the movie might have been added after August 5th. Even if that's not the case, the filmmakers deserve praise for creating such a story.

The film contains heavy language and slang, so be careful who you take when you watch it. 

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