The Storyteller
Starring: Paresh Rawal and Adil Hussain
Directed by Ananth Mahadevan
There are essentially only two characters in Satyajit Ray’s wickedly ironic short story: the storyteller and the storystealer. Director Ananth Mahadevan makes stellar use of two of our more accomplished actors.
Paresh Rawal is Tarini Bandyopadhyay, the wily storyteller and the complacent raconteur in Kolkata who doesn’t write his stories. He just narrates them live. When a Gujarati entrepreneur, Ratan Garodia (Adil Hussain) from Ahmedabad, summons Tarini to drive away his insomnia with his stories, Tarini reluctantly agrees. He doesn’t have anything much to do anyway besides hang around with his best friend.
The rest of the elegantly crafted yarn oscillates between tongue-in-cheek wit and an understated parable on loneliness and the search for fame, albeit temporal.
Mahadevan has always been a quick-witted storyteller. In this, he is one with his protagonist, Tarini. They both like to take their time to tell their stories. In The Storyteller, there is a great deal of attention paid to physical detailing in both the Gujarati and the Bengali milieu. What the production lacks is a macroscopic view of the world the characters inhabit.
In Ray’s original story, the characters represented the gradually emerging picture of an Independent India where literature was being jostled by Capitalism.
The Storyteller plays out like a chamber piece, not that it lacks in vibrant, flavourful outdoor shots of Kolkata and Ahmedabad—and a tilt of cap to cinematographer Alphonse Roy for soaking it in visually—and of course Hriju Roy’s plus Rabindra Sangeet in the background (didn’t know that Sachin Dev Burman’s Tere mere milan ki yeh raina was originally a Tagore tune).
But somewhere in the journey from Ray’s writing to Mahadevan’s cinema the characters have shifted gears from being playfully representational to darkly individualistic. This is not necessarily a compromise or a climbdown.
The Storyteller has a vibrant life of its own independent of the source material. The two principal actors complement each other, though not amicably. And wouldn’t it have been better if Rawal had, predictably, played the Gujarati story-stealer? The women Tannishtha Chatterjee (playing a twinkle-eyed librarian) and Revathi( playing the entrepreneur’s love interest) are wasted in a way Tagore would have never allowed.
The third engaging performance comes from Jayesh More as the entrepreneur’s sullen Man Friday. He seems to know more about the dramatic tension between his boss and the storyteller guest than they do.
