scorecardresearch
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
Advertisement
Premium

Khashi Katha (Bengali) / A well told story

Khashi Katha is a strange story of magic realism that leads us to a real world with sometimes shocking and sometimes expected consequences

Naseeruddin Shah in conversation with the goat Naseeruddin Shah in conversation with the goat

Story, Script and Direction: Judhajit Sarkar

Music :Raja Narayan Deb

Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Subhashish Mukherjee, Shilajit, Prosun Gyne, Anindita Bose, Biswanath Basu, Biswajit Chakraborty, Anindo Banerjee, Mir and others

By Shoma A Chatterji
Khashi Katha is a strange story of magic realism that leads us to a real world with sometimes shocking and sometimes expected consequences. Hassan Ali, (Naseeruddin Shah) is a butcher, ready to slaughter the goat waiting in the pen. But the goat is an intelligent and sharp, witty four-legged creature who begins to tell the butcher a strange story as a political strategy to stall his death. Ali is so caught up in the role of the listener that he, along with the audience, is drawn into the journey with the characters in the story. The story is set against the backdrop of a low-middle-class, poor neightbourhood of Kolkata with a minority population where day-to-day living is a constant struggle.
Salma (Anindita) and Pervez (Prasun Gyne) are two motherless twins of an aged Muslim man (Shubhashish Mukherjee) who works in a bag manufacturing factory. But he is shunted out because he suffers from Parkinson’s disease. His son Pervez is a good-for-nothing guy who fantasises about a newsreader he imagines on television or tries his hand at boxing with little success. The story of Salma’s struggle to find her feet in boxing is constantly juxtaposed against the downfall of her brother into the underworld.
The story-telling session between the goat and Hassan Ali is used like a repeated metaphor and as a reminder that Parvez and Salma are part of a story-within-the-story that might be based on fact or may be a product of the goat’s intelligent imagination.
Sarkar, in his debut feature film, has created a beautiful amalgam of form, content, narrative and music. For the first time in Bengali cinema, the audience is brought face-to-face with a real Muslim ghetto in Kolkata with its narrow gullies, the dirty leather factory, Salma and Parvez’s home with their honest, upright father who finds it difficult to get over the shock of deteriorating values around him, the unkempt boxing ring, the Id and/or Muharram processions with festoons and music. Lorry art, a kind of kitsch art has been used as a backdrop for the titles and also as frames for different scenes captured in animated graphic style and the goat reproduced through computer graphic imagery is wonderful. The voice-over by Kanchan Mullick adds just the right spice and caustic bite to the human Hassan’s ignorance and superciliousness.
Raja Narayan Deb’s musical score is excellent in its versatile reproductions of different genres of music used to fit the situations. Characterisations have been done with great care rounding up each character, big and small, to make it credible and comic and real. Anindita as Salma, Prasun as Parvez, Anindo Banerjee as his mafia friend, Subhashish as the tragic father and Shilajit as the lost champion plus Damini as the manly boxer are well-chosen because they have no star image to impinge on the characters they portray. Shah allows his star aura to overshadow the character of the rooted and ethnically specific Hassan Ali, the butcher. If there is a melodramatic touch, it is in Salma’s friend Asha’s sudden suicide and Salma becoming the boxing champion by using her badly injured hand.
Fact and fiction merge tellingly when the camera closes on an over bridge showing Salma seated close to the camera and the goat tromping away on another side triumphing over his story-telling powers that finally earned him his freedom. We will expect many such wonderful celluloid treats from Judhajit Sarkar and Tilak Sarkar who have produced the film.

First uploaded on: 13-06-2014 at 01:00 IST
Latest Comment
Post Comment
Read Comments
Advertisement
shorts
Maguntas
Political PulseUpdated: March 29, 2024 05:19 IST

Away from the national capital’s courtroom where the case against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is playing out, two key figures embroiled in the excise policy case – four-time MP Magunta Srinivasulu Reddy and his son Raghava Magunta Reddy – are busy campaigning for BJP ally Telugu Desam Party (TDP)

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
close