Three men come to a grassy industrial wasteland on a dark rainy night to find the perfect safe house for smoking brown sugar. With the monochromatic composition with chiaroscuro lighting and the drumming sound of the rain, it feels like entering a haunting world of the dark underbelly of society. For the next 94 minutes, this world gets even darker, hitting rock bottom in Ronny Sen’s Bengali drama, “Cat Sticks.”
Dealing with addiction and its pain and suffering, Sen doesn’t go to the conventional way of telling the whole story in three acts. Any mainstream film dealing with drug addiction follows these three acts: a horrific past of the drug addict (past abuse or losing parents at a young age) that instigates them to use drugs, they succumb to madness, and at the end ‘say no to drugs’ kind of resolution. “Cat Sticks” does not follow this popular convention of drug addiction films. Instead, Sen’s approach to the subject matter is darker and surreal. He breaks the entire movie with four vignettes. It follows addicts coming from different age groups and different strata in the city of Kolkata. It is similar to the hyperlink narrative, where these vignettes intertwine thematically and contextually.
A Story Broken Up into Four Segments
The first segment follows three young men, Pablo, Deshik, and Ronnie and their night-time adventures. This segment itself is divided further into several short vignettes, each following the three men’s activity individually. That follows as Deshik is locked up in his own home by his parents. Pablo gets his stash and goes for another fix in an open grassland filled with addicts, and Ronnie eventually turns himself in a rehab centre.
The second segment tells the story of Potol and Byang, two addicts and their surreal shenanigans on rainy nights. They get the hit, shoplift a medical store, and again go to the same place to sell the products they shoplifted on the earlier occasion.
The third segment follows the tale of three people waiting for a dealer. While they are waiting, various issues from politics to student life are raised, and Sen meticulously imports a subtle criticism of the system, which can be profound at this point.
The fourth segment is about a middle-aged father who even gets into a transgender prostitute to fix the money for drugs.
Dark Commentary on Addiction and its Sufferers
With all these vignettes, Ronny Sen tries to showcase that there is no distinction between the addicts. They are not aliens, but they live within us. They can be college students, someone’s father, or a commoner of any strata. The deeds of these characters are just an example of utter madness. But the fever is not a euphoric one. Sen stated in an interview that he isn’t interested in the ecstatic side of the use of drugs, as it is a short-term feeling. But it is the pain that deepens within the addicts in the long term. Sen deliberately intertwines these stories to create a larger context of this pain and suffering.
As the addicts are considered ostracized, Sen chooses his locations meticulously to get the perfect texture of the fringes of society. Whether they are dingy houses, closed factories, unused wastelands, or dark alleyways, these locations are portrayed so terrifically that it seems they are haunting the characters all the time.
Shreya Dev Dube as the film’s cinematographer just nailed it. Her meticulous composition of each monochrome shot perfectly captures the film’s dark tone. With this meticulous composition of images, the sound design by Sukanta Majumdar is also praiseworthy. He perfectly captures the ambient noises — i.e. cat’s meowing or noises coming out of televisions. These effects further elevate the alienation and connote the internal states of the characters’ inner selves.
An Important Cautionary Tale About Drug Abuse
Although all these aspects hit right away, the film cannot fully delve the audience into the characters’ emotional arcs. The actors try to portray their respective roles with utmost sincerity. However, the screenplay does not give them the crucial space to grow naturally. The intertwining of separate segments often interrupts a particular story’s overall arc. Also, there are no specific motivations for several incidents in the film, and they seem to make their place forcefully into the narrative. Especially in the middle portion of the film, it takes some wrong turns, in my opinion, as the repetition of smoking heroin becomes prevalent.
When average contemporary Bengali films are becoming trashier years after year, “Cat Sticks” has come to offer something new. Despite having its flaws, it is an important cautionary tale about drug abuse. And Sen’s vision, even as a debutant, should get higher remarks for his honest and bold representation of the fringe of the society.
“Cat Sticks” is currently streaming on Mubi and the Mubi Amazon Channel. You can buy “Cat Sticks” on Google Play Movies, YouTube, Amazon Video as download or rent it on Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube online.
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