It is not his fault that directors use his charm to sell unsaleable, meaningless films. It is not his fault that he has good looks, a body to flaunt. But was this film supposed to be a documentary on Africa, with a clown in the lead? The answer is a resounding NO. Soumik Haldar’r cinematography is flawless. He takes Bengali cinema to a new height with breathtaking depiction of Africa. And suddenly, Chander Pahar makes me hate him. He took the art of film-making to a whole new level with Meghe Dhaka Tara.
I didn’t quite like Urochithi (the director’s first film). If a product lacks the soul the original creator had infused into it, it is bound to fail. But a common thread of creativity and imagination runs through both of them. Book and film are two different media to communicate ideas. Passionate about films and Bengali literature that he is, i doubt if he could digest the inhuman savagery of a novel that any Bengali kid (well, once upon a time when smartphones were not the order of the day) would grow up with. Watching Chander Pahar on the silver screen, mind bleeding to death, i was thanking God that Ritu Da is dead. The real Mountains of the Moon would have been the Rwenzori range which has dense tropical rain forests just like in the book.“What is a film all about? It is all about capturing fleeting moments” – Rituparno Ghosh had famously told us through one of his characters. Also, due to a mix-up in the names of the mountain ranges in the original book, the film mostly shows the Richtersveld mountains which hardly have any forest cover. One particular omission that pained me was the absence of any mention of the strange baobab tree, something that immensely fascinated the Shankar of the novel. The scenes in Salisbury of 1911 are believable, though obviously the city was not shown on a grand scale. The first lion sequence, the cave and the Kalahari have been shown particularly well. He got that mostly right barring a few exceptions. He had to shoot on location, show the real thing, or he would be caught cheating. However, the director's work was not easy either, since the viewer of today is raised on Discovery and National Geographic Channel documentaries on Africa. He must have had to work really hard to get most of the facts right. When Bibhutibhushan wrote the book, research was difficult. What will Shankar see next? What will the Bunyip do?
While reading the novel we turn pages tense with anticipation. By the magic of his pen, Bibhutibhushan instills that same fear in the readers' hearts. Shankar never sees the Bunyip, but he sees what it can do, and he sees the fear in fearless Diego Alvarez's eyes when the Bunyip is mentioned. Diego Alvarez says it is an animal that killed his friend. Who or what is the Bunyip? The tribal people say he is an evil spirit who guards the diamond mines. Shankar, a youth from a remote Bengal village explores Africa with seasoned adventurer Diego Alvarez, and along with man-eating lions and black mambas and herds of elephants, he also runs into the mythical Bunyip lurking in the Mountains of the Moon. In my opinion this is where the story succeeds as a spine chilling adventure. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was no doubt aware of this problem when he was writing Chander Pahar, and so he decided to never expose Bunyip, the mythical beast that guards the diamond mines in his story. That is the point where most horror movies fail - as soon as they show the cause of fear, a lot of their viewers simply stop being scared anymore. Which is the scariest real or fictional creature ever? Dracula? Frankenstein's monster? Spiders? King Kong? Ghosts from innumerable horror movies? Septopus? Dementor? Velociraptor? The answers will, of course, be as diverse as people are, since what scares one could seem comical to another.
0 kommentar(er)
