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Director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan, in partnership with writer Kireet Khurana, has extended Satyajit Ray’s short story Golpo Boliye Tarini Khuro into The Storyteller, a 116-minute drama available on Disney+ Hotstar. Tarini Bandopadhyay (Paresh Rawal) is a recently retired writer, whose longest assignment lasted 13 weeks. He’s a widower who is content with his Calcutta life and takes meticulous care of his Ambassador car. Conversations with his fellow comrades, over fish fry and fish curry, are rarely without mention of Capitalism and its ills and almost always end with ‘Tarini tales’. Tarini is a wonderful storyteller. Even after his wife gifted him a pen to encourage him, Tarini never recorded his imaginative and original stories.
Tarini’s life undergoes a seismic shift when he leaves Calcutta to take up a job as a storyteller in Ahmedabad. There, he meets Mr. Garodia (Adil Hussain), a successful, unmarried cotton businessman. Ironically, he suffers from insomnia and is unable to sleep on the very soft cotton sheets that he himself makes. He needs a storyteller to help him fall asleep. Or so he tells Tarini. As Tarini says of his association with Garodia, “He sells cottons, I spin yarns.”
Tarini can conjure up fantastical tales with the slightest inspiration—a wooden chair, a pigeon, etc. He cites Picasso, Gorky, Tagore and Marx and, while passing time in Ahmedabad, he gets enamoured by name-dropping librarian Suzie, played by Tannishtha Chatterjee.
Garodia surrounds himself with books which he hopes will intellectualise him by osmosis. The hangs prints of Picasso on the walls of his expansive home with one male caretaker and a wandering stray cat that is after the residents of a fish tank.
Gujarati and Bengali cultural clashes—Rawal’s reactions are spot on as he samples typical Gujarati dishes such as thepla and dhokla, and craves maach (fish)—is one of the running themes of the film. However, essentially, the story asks who is the real storyteller—the one who narrates a story or the one who writes it? “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, remarks Tarini. Alongside, issues of plagiarism, wealth and success, deceit, confidence and lethargy, heartbreak and pursuit are also explored.
Revathy plays Garodia’s old acquaintance Saraswati. Though her character is a catalyser, the actress has a few unremarkable scenes. Hussain and Rawal are wonderful in their parts, switching between Hindi and Gujarati or Hindi and Bengali, inhabiting Garodia and Tarini’s diametrically dissimilar politics, diets, principals, motivations and acumen judiciously. The relaxed narrative pace is a blip in an otherwise satisfying retelling of a classic fable that is equally about outwitting another and surmounting self-imposed impediments.
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