At two ends of the spectrum

If numbers are indicators of the productivity of a regional film industry, Bengali filmmakers ought to be happy. It produces around 160 feature films a year layered through different plots, stories, treatment and approach.
 New directors are mushrooming every day, never mind if their first directorial film is also their last. Established directors are either banking on what they think is “out-of-the-box” subjects such as Bengalisation (read hybridisation) of William Shakespeare or legendary detective stories. 
Then, there are filmmakers like Kaushik Ganguly who constantly underscore the Bengali identity and fare well both in terms of commerce and festival screenings. Ganguly’s last three films, Chhotoder Chhobi on circus midgets, Cinemawallah on the death of single screen theatres and Bisorjon, which bagged the National Award, has the Bengali audience responding well enough to guarantee a producer for his next film. The problem lies in the confusion created by films as polarised as Posto and Tope.
 The former is drawing full houses and the latter has disappeared from the theatres within a week. Why? How do viewers react to these polarised changes? Viewers have a definite role to play in determining the future of any filmmaker. The best example, in which the audience-director chemistry has been working brilliantly, is in the films of the director-duo Shibaprasad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy.
 Their latest film Posto is the best example of this chemistry where every theatre screening the film in Kolkata and the rest of the state is drawing a full house for every single show. According to the grapevine, it is scheduled to release across the country soon in dubbed or subtitled versions. 
Posto is another “feel-good” film from the Shiboprosad-Nandita stable that began with the disturbing but out-of-the-box Icche to evolve into cleverly veiled family melodramas in Belasheshe, Praktan and now Posto. The film will never garner awards but does that matter to the producers, directors, actors and crew? Most importantly, does it bother Bengali viewers who are overjoyed to simply discover that there is one good value for money film? Posto is a story loudly narrated with the decibels reaching a crescendo in the courtroom scenes with Sohini Dasgupta screaming her arguments. 
If Posto can be defined as the North Pole of contemporary Bengali cinema, then Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Tope can best qualify as the South Pole. Here is one director who does not bother about viewership with the sole exceptions of a couple of foreign festival audiences where his films find screening. Most of his films such as Ami,Yasin O Amar Madhubala and Anwar Miya Ka Ajab Kissa have not even been released in India. Tope has been adapted from a powerful short story by Narayan Gangopadhyay that, within a few pages of the narration, comes across as an extremely sharp indictment on the brutal, feudal practice where, a feudal lord, desperate to get a killing on a tiger hunt uses an impoverished small boy as bait to satisfy his inflated ego. Dasgupta does not believe in translating from word to film and that is understandable for any director. But Tope erases the author from the film version and is appropriated in his own idiosyncratic way by the auteur, Dasgupta. Dasgupta, known for magic realism and surrealistic touches, stretches the borders of reason and sanity to use cinema as his language to pen poetry. The result is a collage of images and characters who appear to be runaways from different lunatic asylums unwittingly brought together through a story that makes no sense. Goja, the peon from the local post office, decides to make the branch of huge tree his home and the local monkeys his “family” never mind the wife and mother he has left behind. A madari couple exploits their little girl Munni by forcing her to perform balancing tricks on a rope. These are not real people nor are they inspired by the original story. In one sense, they are baits for the director to pierce his surrealistic, poetic, lyrical fishing hook on. In another sense, he has turned into bait himself as a director without viewers but with a Masters’ screening in at least one international film festival every year. But Dasgupta was never one for the “filmmakerviewer chemistry.”