Tasher Desh

The film has been described as a "trippy adaptation" of the Rabindrath Tagore's play. Music and poetry is main soul of the film ,thats reason film move on without boring. You'd either love 'Tasher Desh' or hate it, but you can definitely not ignore it.

The narration has three layers bursting with lessons of life, regarding rules, hopes, desires and fate.It's a story about society and culture, of brotherhood and winds of destiny, of acceptance and revolution. It's a journey of twosomes and foursomes, of abstract and reality.

For those who do not understand Bengali, one needs patience for the film to grow on you to decipher what's happening on screen. And by the time the final song rolls out with patriotic gusto with lyrics that screech: "Break every barrier, let your mind break free/ Do you have the courage? It's a long way to freedom, be free, be pure", and you will probably understand and appreciate 'Tasher Desh'. Or else, as one of the characters say at the very beginning of the film, "You will never understand. Nothing is real. In reality, everything is a fantasy, fiction." Accept the film the way it is. Director Q's treatment of the film is very non-figurative, dramatic and musical like in a music video. It is a grand tour of illusion.

Directed by Qaushiq Mukherjee (of the 2010 cult film Gandu the loser fame) this film, stands true to its word, being a quirky take on the play of the same name written by Rabindranath Tagore. The film's narrative has great shades of surrealism, fantasy and neo noir which as an impressive graph of development where two stories go hand in hand and they intersect at the pre climax , plus after few scenes with hardly any dialogues, the film takes a sweet boost and the rest is assured, drawing inspirations from Satyajit Ray's film "Goopy Gyen Bagha Byen" and the director's own previous work. The best part of the film lies in the cinematography by Manu Dacosee and the director himself, where every frame is a pure work of art and noir, the music score by Neel and Miti Adhikari and Q which takes on the Rabindra Sangeet with a tinge of some loud Western music making every song worth listening, then even editing by Nikon is great that well compliments the narrative, the performances by Tilotama Shome, Joyraj, Anubrata, Imaad Shah and Rii Sen. The film is a must watch for cinema lovers. My rating would be: 4/5. 

Visually stunning, making use of all phographic techniques, psychedelic, disjointed, lost in its exuberance of colour composition and collage, the film loses it's centre and slips into a numbing fantasy.

Tasher Desh is a psychotomimetic vision of Qaushiq Mukherjee's unapologetic experiment that goes beyond the professed acid trip. A madcap versifier, with almost fanatical obsession for the outré, becomes a master conjurer conjuring up compelling and bizarre images in a non-linear, dual narrative that slowly seduces the audience into a hypnotic psychedelic ride. The inertia of the chimeric first half explodes into a volatile kinetic force as we are introduced to the restless motley of Card soldiers in the fascist dystopo-neverland. The very Q-esque split-screen shots, hyperstylised edginess of hand-held camera movements trigger the hallucinatory surreal eeriness of a grungy meta-reality. But everything goes downhill from then on. Mr. Infant Terrible suddenly turns into a glorified music video director haplessly resorting to deliberate abstractness as an escape route for his fizzling out self-indulgences. The sensory and visual striptease becomes clumsier in the amorous exchanges which reduces the prophesied sexual liberation into a libidinous exercise with an unsuspecting abrupt climax. Zany, techno-funk pagan Rabindrasangeet and Manu Dacosse's flamboyantly sumptuous cinematography are the two biggest gains from this discordant and floundering amorphous fantasy drama. And, a special mention for the subtitling which is impeccably apt and incredibly germane.

I had the luck to see this film a few years ago with my partner, and then later we both couldn't remember what it was called. Fortunately a friend reminded me, and I'm so pleased. This has become a new favorite. An exciting storyline full of symbolism (both meaningful and for the sake of unique imagery), a dreamlike atmosphere, excellent cinematography and makeup reminiscent of German expressionism. It's dizzyingly psychedelic, and at times confusing, but not disorganized or pointlessly random. There's a lot of little threads to follow, but all the noticeable themes leave plenty of room for your own perspective. It's not your typical movie by a long shot, and if you're not into surrealism, the joy I felt for this film might be lost on you. In any case, we've got creative storytelling combined with fine acting and beautifully strange imagery. If you're in the mood for something decidedly different, but you've already watched Twin Peaks again and crave something "refreshingly trippy"--- definitely take a stroll into The Land of Cards.