Read Tagore's play Tasher Desh once again and then saw its cinematic adaptation by Q.
For me, a significant question Rabindranath's play asks has to do with the dialectic of desire and law in the world of dreams. Rabindranath's counter-Freudian masterstroke was to see the 'machinic unconscious' as a world of 'law' which represses the real of desire with linguistic codification and hence the distinctively discursive and Symbolic apparatus of the playing card as a paradigm of the non-human in the dream world.
The yawn at the origin of the card species and the sneeze which mythifies the origins of the human have to be taken seriously in terms of their stress on the corporeal in its relation to the birth of words. The upward yawn and the downward sneeze are both aerated emanations of the body in all its sensations and they play with the edge of spoken language which is a companion piece of the two. There are a host of other such brilliant innovations in the play relating to the human and the non-human in association with the unconscious formation of dreams which merit minute analysis. Tagore's project of humanising the figurative world of dreams where the symbolic undercuts the real affect of the human is a memorable journey on its own. This could have been a potential direction for an adaptive teasing out of things but the film does not go there...fair enough...
And of course there is the layer of political allegory and a critique of dictatorship; the play's dedication to Netaji Subhashchandra Bose spells it out in a way. This is the track followed and radicalised by Q in the film. I have no problems with eroticising the original because it does offer that possibility but to reduce the problem of law and freedom to 'sexuality' is too much of an exclusionism I felt!
As if the 'uncovering' in Tagore meant nothing but stripping!
The sexual revolution in Q's film is further tarnished by the inanity of the revenge motif smuggled into the narrative. The director's fantasmatic split reinforces a unitary authorial consciousness on the work which Tagore's play in my mind only tries to undermine. Perhaps the film tries to do the same by having Joyraj as both the decadent director and the King of the card species but for me the doubling does not work and the frame narrative still looks jaded; this stupid romanticisation of the Bengali intellectual as a failed pyjama-clad, side-bagged geek is done to death and simply intolerable! In general I think the film tried to do a bit too much and the intended esoteric often bordered on intellectual pretence, one-upmanship on Tagore and a muddled stunt of over-signification.
On the plus side, I did think some of the images were arresting enough in their painting like evocations, the surrealist motifs were overdone but on occasions they did leave an impression; the table tennis sequence at the beginning was interesting; they tried to do the text in a very 'theatrical' way often indulging in a rehearsal-like repetition and throw of dialogues; the decision to alienate and 'minorize' Bengali language by making non-native speakers speak different Bengalis was an interesting performative choice and I did think that it contributed to the humanisation of the mechanical card language with the accents stumbling and tottering instead of flowing seamlessly. Performance wise Joyraj and the lady who played the queen in the human world were impressive.
In Q's rendering, if the dream world of cards is all law and no eros and to humanise that world, one has to 'sexualise' it, the question crops up if sexual instinct can be the definitive human trait? What about the non-human animals? This would mean that the dream world is 'sexless' and simply mechanical while for me what Tagore implies is not this kind of simplistic compartmentalisation but a complex interweaving of the erotic and the machinic qua the human!
Is it 'I fuck therefore I am human' and otherwise I am a machinic face of law?
What about the law of sexuality itself?
In this way, one law will only replace another and to see this as man's 'revenge' (or the prince's revenge on behalf of his mother in true blue Manmohan Desai style) makes it even more ludicrous!
Tasher Desh is an absolutely brilliant work by Tagore and Q's meddling is way too overambitious and flat!
For me, a significant question Rabindranath's play asks has to do with the dialectic of desire and law in the world of dreams. Rabindranath's counter-Freudian masterstroke was to see the 'machinic unconscious' as a world of 'law' which represses the real of desire with linguistic codification and hence the distinctively discursive and Symbolic apparatus of the playing card as a paradigm of the non-human in the dream world.
The yawn at the origin of the card species and the sneeze which mythifies the origins of the human have to be taken seriously in terms of their stress on the corporeal in its relation to the birth of words. The upward yawn and the downward sneeze are both aerated emanations of the body in all its sensations and they play with the edge of spoken language which is a companion piece of the two. There are a host of other such brilliant innovations in the play relating to the human and the non-human in association with the unconscious formation of dreams which merit minute analysis. Tagore's project of humanising the figurative world of dreams where the symbolic undercuts the real affect of the human is a memorable journey on its own. This could have been a potential direction for an adaptive teasing out of things but the film does not go there...fair enough...
And of course there is the layer of political allegory and a critique of dictatorship; the play's dedication to Netaji Subhashchandra Bose spells it out in a way. This is the track followed and radicalised by Q in the film. I have no problems with eroticising the original because it does offer that possibility but to reduce the problem of law and freedom to 'sexuality' is too much of an exclusionism I felt!
As if the 'uncovering' in Tagore meant nothing but stripping!
The sexual revolution in Q's film is further tarnished by the inanity of the revenge motif smuggled into the narrative. The director's fantasmatic split reinforces a unitary authorial consciousness on the work which Tagore's play in my mind only tries to undermine. Perhaps the film tries to do the same by having Joyraj as both the decadent director and the King of the card species but for me the doubling does not work and the frame narrative still looks jaded; this stupid romanticisation of the Bengali intellectual as a failed pyjama-clad, side-bagged geek is done to death and simply intolerable! In general I think the film tried to do a bit too much and the intended esoteric often bordered on intellectual pretence, one-upmanship on Tagore and a muddled stunt of over-signification.
On the plus side, I did think some of the images were arresting enough in their painting like evocations, the surrealist motifs were overdone but on occasions they did leave an impression; the table tennis sequence at the beginning was interesting; they tried to do the text in a very 'theatrical' way often indulging in a rehearsal-like repetition and throw of dialogues; the decision to alienate and 'minorize' Bengali language by making non-native speakers speak different Bengalis was an interesting performative choice and I did think that it contributed to the humanisation of the mechanical card language with the accents stumbling and tottering instead of flowing seamlessly. Performance wise Joyraj and the lady who played the queen in the human world were impressive.
In Q's rendering, if the dream world of cards is all law and no eros and to humanise that world, one has to 'sexualise' it, the question crops up if sexual instinct can be the definitive human trait? What about the non-human animals? This would mean that the dream world is 'sexless' and simply mechanical while for me what Tagore implies is not this kind of simplistic compartmentalisation but a complex interweaving of the erotic and the machinic qua the human!
Is it 'I fuck therefore I am human' and otherwise I am a machinic face of law?
What about the law of sexuality itself?
In this way, one law will only replace another and to see this as man's 'revenge' (or the prince's revenge on behalf of his mother in true blue Manmohan Desai style) makes it even more ludicrous!
Tasher Desh is an absolutely brilliant work by Tagore and Q's meddling is way too overambitious and flat!
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