Ronnie Sen gives us a one-night stand with the lives of Tamanna Bhai, Pablo, Byong and Potol, but Sen was not making a bildungsroman out of Cat Sticks (2021), he digs his nails into the debris and debauchery of the hollow men of Calcutta. On a rainy night, the city is like a platform for a train to the exploits of brown sugar, as the termites of financial dearth, family toxicity, and loneliness nibble everything away, and their fates intertwine when they try to escape it all to get high, and they do get high, but the lows are always there -tiding.
During the peasants’ fight with the landlords and the cops, a revolutionary movement that shaped the political landscape of West Bengal for nearly ten years persuaded Tamanna Bhai’s radical rebellion; he was in custody during the 1960s. Due to his struggle with PTSD because of police brutality and the resultant alienation from society – in the end he sat in his broken airplane, its only pilot, stationary – handicapped in the margins of melancholia as people go about their days. Sen portrays the delirium of abandoned outcasts, often contained in the comic discourse of ‘junkies’. The quiet breaths they take between their invisible smokes echo the howls of Allen Ginsberg, casted away on the monochrome of a film camera for 18 days.
At last, the film ends, the crews pack up, the actors go home, and the people who need a better world linger in the shadows casted by our morality. That is the irony of cinema, it is indeed a song of the bird that has come to love its own cage.
-Payal Srivastava
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