What a pleasure it is to encounter an adaptation of a Satyajit Ray story — Ananth Mahadevan’s The Storyteller, streaming on JioHotstar— that does not look like the filmmaker simply placed a camera on the pages of the story and shot the text. Ever since the Feludas and other adaptations of Ray’s stories started flooding the Bengali film and web series market after 2003, one has watched these adaptations with despair.
Barring the Netflix anthology Ray, no other adaptation managed to break the mould. In fact, Tarini Khuro has been on screen in a Sandip Ray adaptation – an anthology featuring Paran Bandopadhyay in the titular role – that suffers from the flaws endemic to all adaptations of Ray: an unimaginative adherence to the text. Ananth Mahadevan’s The Storyteller is a welcome break. And the film works thanks largely to Adil Hussain’s terrific performance, and what the writers bring to the table.
Tarini Khuro exemplifies the distinctive raconteur that Bengalis of a generation would be well aware of. Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada is another example. A teller of tall tales with certain intellectual pretensions who looks down upon mundane bourgeoisie engagements like holding on to a job, instead preferring to gather around them a bunch of people who often go by names like Nepla and Poltu, sitting at a tea shop (or in the case of Tarini at the residence of one of his audience of five schoolchildren), plying his tales to the accompaniment of tea and snacks that are provided by the band of listeners as fees for his labour.
This particular story involves Tarini (Paresh Rawal) answering an advertisement seeking a storyteller in Ahmedabad. A businessman Mr Garodia (Adil Hussain) suffers from insomnia and is looking to employ the services of someone who can narrate original stories – that’s the key requirement; the stories must be the product of the storyteller’s imagination and not already existing and published, which is crucial to the twist in the tail. So, Tarini, working with the Free Press Journal in Bombay, gives up his job, moves to Ahmedabad, and thus unfolds the adventure. The writers of the film do a wonderful job of fleshing out the story in unexpected ways.
For one, they give Tarini a cast of friends and family (long-distance calls with a son and grandson in the US) absent in the original which has all of three characters. They also include flashbacks to a wife who gifts Tarini a pen so that he can graduate to writing the stories he narrates. The adaptation places Tarini in Kolkata to begin with, which gives the film an excuse to shoot the banks of the Ganga and the now-mandatory shots (for any film set in the city) of Durga Puja and have Tagore’s ‘Purano shei diner kawtha’ and other melodies play in the background in stretches where nothing much happens. The script also has Tarini ranting about capitalism (he blames Goradia’s insomnia as a byproduct of capitalism), which is aimed at highlighting the differences between the two protagonists.
The more important changes that they bring in lie, one, in the way they address the core idea in the story, that of ‘plagiarism’. (Tarini’s response to it in the story – where he is decidedly vengeful in his attitude – is markedly different from that in the film.) Two, the script also brings in arguments around the ‘thinker, intellectual Bengali’ and the ‘doer, philistine Gujarati’, with the trader Goradia taunting the creative Tarini: Yeh duniya sochne waalon ki nahin, karne waalon ki hai (this world is not for thinkers but for doers). Goradia obviously has a complex about his ‘intellectual’ shortcomings and is obsessed about not measuring up to the esteem of the woman he has loved all his life (Revathy, in a cameo) because she worships literature – she is even called Saraswati! There’s also a track that focuses on the food habits of the two men, with Tarini’s fondness for fish contrasting the Gujarati’s plate of thepla.
Not all of the changes land well. The librarian character, for example, does not work, appearing rather stilted though the way she fibs (her family name is Fibert!) about Ruskin Bond and other authors is quite delightful. Though these changes offer an interesting contrast between the two, it is anybody’s guess whether Ray intended to use these ‘stereotypes’ to highlight the differences. Ray’s story is not interested in these debates and is more in the nature of a tale narrated for pleasure on a lazy afternoon. There is no doubt, however, that these do add layers to the relationship that inform the two men in the original. In one delightful sequence, Tarini says, referring to Goradia, ‘He sells cotton, I spin yarns’. Ray could not have put it better.
If despite all these pluses, The Storyteller does not quite come together it’s primarily on two counts. One, the narrative drags in patches. There simply isn’t enough in the five-page original to merit a 110-minute film. Sandip Ray’s adaptation, Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy, had two half-hour episodes, and even those felt long. There are stretches in Mahadevan’s film where nothing material happens and one is almost driven to pushing the fast-forward button.
However, the near-fatal flaw that almost sinks the film is Paresh Rawal’s miscasting as Tarini. There is, in the way Ray’s stories unfold, a certain rice-and-fish-eating, tea-and-adda-loving Bengali ‘intellectual’ in Tarini. In fact, the one thing that Sandip Ray’s adaptation got spot-on is Paran Bandopadhyay in the titular character. Those who have seen Paran will immediately know what is wrong with Paresh (one almost waits for him to break into his Babu Bhai from Hera Pheri mode). In fact, time and again I was driven to think what it would be like to have the roles reversed — Adil as Tarini and Paresh as Goradia. And there is nothing more irritating than a non-Bengali actor trying to speak Bengali in a Hindi film. Here, it is even harder to digest because I am not quite sure why Tarini had to be given Bengali phrases to speak to begin with.
That the film works despite this is because, one, Adil brings to his portrayal a terrific dignity; and, two, the imaginative writing for the most part (including the animation used when Tarini is narrating the stories), which is so refreshing when seen in the light of the Ray adaptations that originate from Bengal. A special word on the cinematography which holds the film together in those patches where nothing much happens. If only someone had advised the filmmakers on Paresh Rawal playing Tarini, this could have been so much more.
(Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer)