A handful of images from three different films have lately been swarming in my mind and compelled me to revisit them. In one stretch, I re-watched Ronny Senโs โCatsticksโ (2019), Ishaan Ghoseโs โJhilliโ (2021) and Aditya Vikram Senguptaโs โOnce Upon a Time in Calcuttaโ (2021). In the whirlwind of post-watch afterthought, I dared to postulate these three films as a single thesis โ you can call this a neo-Kolkata trilogy as well โ co-written by three different writers. The last of the mentioned titles has been rechristened โMayanagarโ and released in the theatres recently. So, now it would be convenient to talk about this gamut of films that encounter the spectral โotherโ in a dystopia hidden in the crevices of a decaying megalopolis.
Ronny Senโs debut feature โCatsticksโ was a bold attempt, in the context of Bangla as well as Indian cinema, to deal with the issue of substance abuse. Kolkata as a metropolis is less notorious than her counterparts in India when it comes to drug abuse. But this is either an erroneous fallacy or a misconception that we love to keep and quite consciously use as a cloak to cover the cityโs sanctimonious โbhadraalokโ character. What โCatsticksโ does is unveil the chuddar and force us to peep into the corners of Kolkata that we wouldnโt have dared to stare at otherwise. In doing so, the film experiments with form to an extent but it remarkably embellishes the narrative with imagery alien to Bangla cinema before.
Ronny Sen, a well-known photographer, has been influenced majorly by a Japanese avant-garde photography movement called โThe Provoke Movement.โ In the late 1960s, this movement was pioneered by a group of young photographers (Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, and others), who redefined the aesthetics of street photography. Senโs โCatsticksโ is mostly set in the streets โ dead alleys, dirty lanes โ of Kolkata, and he curates the images with a grainy, oblique, and unstable aperture โ qualities inherited from the โProvoke.โ
The film satellites around three groups of people, highlighting the interplay of class politics, who are under serious substance abuse and end up in a state of dejection that we usually do not care to notice. Sen organized each and every mise-en-scรจne with such detailed imagery that it makes you uncomfortable to look at it for long, be it the nuanced brown sugar smoking scenes or the enchanting orchestration of two intoxicated characters who struggle to spot each otherโs veins to inject drugs.
The discomfort increases with every passing minute as Shreya Dev Dubeโs camera denies incessant movement and contemplates, demanding attention and testing your patience to look at the stark, dirty images that you would have abhorred to encounter otherwise. โCatsticksโ in a sense, apart from its content โ that too is urgent for us to engage with โ could be remembered as a film that radically departed from the conventional composition of images.
Two years later โJhilliโ(2021) was premiered and awarded The Golden Royal Bengal Tiger award at the 27th Kolkata International Film Festival. Among the three films I have chosen to engage with in this piece, โJhilliโ is, at least to me, the most experimental one and explores something that you would least expect from a debutant (Ishaan Ghose). If โCatsticksโ deferred to incorporate the regular imagery available in the popular discourse, โJhilliโ then refused to bow down to the customary forms of storytelling. It portrays the dreams and desires of a sect that inhabits the area around the โDhapaโ dumpyard (known as โDhapar Mathโ) in eastern Kolkata.
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Far from the affluent skyscrapers and beneath the ebullient flyovers, there exists a place, since colonial India, that swallows the discards of the city and exudes a stench that invisibly pushes us away from coming closer to it. The primacy of Ghoseโs brilliance lies in choosing this dumpyard as the chief location for his film. Contrary to the camera reposes of โCatsticksโ, Ghose garners a method materialized by anxious, handheld camera movements โ executed by Ghose himself โ to forge his narrative. This methodical approach is perhaps the only possible course through which โJhilliโ could have given shape to its content because it makes you feel unnervingly uneasy. Ishaan admits, โTo create anything memorable and worthwhile, discomfort should be the main point; physical and mental endurance is the most important thingโ, and effectuates it meticulously.
You are bound to feel nausea arising from your guts when you see โBokulโ cutting flesh from a carcass, you may struggle to find the apt emotion to respond to a certain characterโs gibberish English and the pig hunting scene will make you uncomfortable in a certain way, simply because you havenโt seen โHow to Hunt a Pigโ in the course of your life. The purpose of โJhilliโ was to unlock a degree of discomfort in order to articulate its substance, and it does so successfully by refusing to enact the conventional forms available in the cosmopolitan film establishment and attempting to reinvent its own form to embody the subject matter.
The third title to undertake here is โMayanagarโ โ Aditya Vikram Senguptaโs third feature. Unlike his previous two features, Sengupta here enlarges his canvas and takes an overtly political stance. โMayanagarโ is a requiem for a city that is dying as the people who used to reside in the heart of it are moving out to the expanded flanks of the metropolis. With the end of a three-decade-long communist regime, the humane character of Kolkata has also degenerated. Sengupta explores this decayed side of the city that is slowly waxing over its other half โ known for its honesty and integrity. Every character at play in the film is dishonest in one way or another, which mirrors the character of the city: Bhaskar da (Arindam Ghosh) is honest at his workplace but lies to Ela (brilliantly played by Sreelekha Mitra), Ela succumbs to greed and shares bed with her lecherous boss.
Sengupta has lately been experimental with form in โJonakiโ โ his sophomore feature, that tells an ordinary tale in an extraordinary way โ but for โMayanagarโ, he chooses the mainstream narrative form. This decision could be considered useful if the sole purpose of the maker was to reach out to the masses but to critique boldly the evil political establishment of West Bengal โ that has infected the city and its people โ something that Sengupta wishes to do, would have required a diligent experimentation with form.
โMayanagarโ has worked only partially for me because it has undertaken issues, such as chit-fund scams, evil dominance of syndicates, decaying culture et al., which should be addressed, but to instill a critical view of these issues and to leave a impact on the audienceโs psyche, the film would have needed its own organic way of narration. This time Senguptaโs attempt, which had worked before, fell into the traps of canonical slow-cinema โ typical tropes that it could have bypassed.
The purpose of this article is not to discuss the substance of the chosen films at length, but rather to emphasize the forms that the films had embodied to articulate its substance, and check whether a gamut of three different filmmakers can coexist in a hypothesized triptych. This postulated space for the three films works together fractionally; they indeed work if treated as mere narratives only โ documenting and critiquing the degeneration of a city, once reputed for its conscientious character; but one must keep in mind that the alpha and omega of these three films is a quest for space from where they can critique the sickening macabre effects of capitalism.
For a film to critique capitalism, it needs an apparatus that radically dissents to incorporate the โglobalizedโ pieces of machinery available in cosmopolitan settings. โCatsticksโ and โJhilliโ embody this dissent in their structural organization of the narrative, but โMayanagarโ fell prey to one of those methodical approaches that have been engulfed by the dominant bourgeois sense of aesthetics. So, I must conclude by saying that our quest for the third title for this Neo-Kolkata trilogy must continue but until we find a suitable one, โMayanagarโ can be placed in the third place as the content of the film is urgent and needs your attention.
