Director: Dhrubo Banerjee
Solid: Kaushik Ganguly, Anirban Bhattacharya
Streaming on: Hoichoi
Tiktiki is what we generally name a two-hander – a duel between two characters, often males (typically performed by charismatic actors), typically engaged in a sort of psychological battle. That is the stuff of theatre however may also make for riveting cinema. Psychological is the operative phrase right here, with characters messing with the others head – and in extension the viewers’s. This requires strategic set design, considerate use of areas, digicam angles that distort or trick our senses, sound results – on the very fundamental stage, they should be anchored in phrases.
When Soumitra Chatterjee tailored Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) – wherein a thriller author invitations his spouse’s lover to actual revenge designed as an elaborate prank – for the display screen, he transported it right into a plausible Bengali milieu with the assistance of his wealthy prose and his grasp over the textual content. Given the restricted sources of the telefilm medium, Chatterjee pared down the unique’s manor home right into a drawing room setting. Each prop on this personal menagerie stated one thing about its disturbed inhabitant – a leather-bound assortment of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, shut ups of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son: an aged Bengali aristocrat with a effective style for the bizarre, along with his housecoat and that louche moustache, awaiting his visitor like Rely Dracula himself.
ALSO READ: ALL EYES ON ANIRBAN BHATTACHARYA
Dhrubo Banerjee, who has made the brand new Tiktiki, adjustments the setting again to a manor home equal, a rajbari, however doesn’t appear to know what to do with all that area. There’s a stuffed royal Bengal tiger and an historical board recreation however the remaining is simply filled with fillers – showpieces and antiques that don’t actually say something. It takes particular expertise to take a rajbari and render it so generic. The home within the new Tiktiki could possibly be the home in REKKA, or any up to date Bengali movie for that matter. They use Bengal’s heritage buildings as a result of they suppose it’s the brief minimize to creating it look ‘cinematic’, with none effort to discover its structure and textures to boost the story visually. The cerebral nature of the piece demanded extra advanced lighting – as an alternative, we have now a flat vibrant yellow prefer it has been lit by chandeliers.
If the concept was to stage it like a jalshaghar, wherein a jugalbandi of kinds performs out between the 2 actors, it wanted higher writing within the first place – the strains wanted to sing. There isn’t any coherence, when it comes to costume or lighting within the actuality of the world this story is about in. Bhattacharya’s Milan Basak doesn’t costume up like a man who owns {an electrical} retailer in mofussil Bengal. Banerjee is both not the proper director for this one or he was anticipating Kaushik Ganguly and Bhattacharya – administrators themselves – to sail him by. The one main change he introduces is laughable and has no enterprise being on this story.
Which isn’t to say I used to be anticipating Tiktiki to be a masterpiece. Certainly my expertise as a reviewer has taught me higher. Nonetheless the prospect of a face-off between Ganguly and Bhattacharya appeared enjoyable – how dangerous may it’s? Some sparks fly once they first meet – maybe extra a operate of the intrigue and thriller inherent within the first act of any story reasonably than the rest – and I believe most of them are improvisatory. However the remaining bored the f*ck out of me. Just like the crumbling outdated mansions can appear beauty with out in a position and exact path, even the very best of actors can appear clueless. Bhattacharya comes throughout as too informal, falling right into a predictable sample of speech with the ruffian twang he brings to indicate his working class background; Ganguly’s childlike obsessiveness is simply too in your face and nothing that you simply haven’t seen him do. Their liveliest trade is available in a scene the place Milan is playing around in a single room and Ganguly’s Soumendra Krishna Deb is scolding him from one other. Arguably it’s the present’s greatest scene, and tellingly, doesn’t characteristic the 2 in the identical body.
