Navigating through Kolkata on a rainy November day to catch the Cat Sticks premiere was quite a task, with the traffic more arduous than usual, the rains incessant and heavy, and the passes at Nandan frequently running out. But the crowd at Nandan 1 spoke a different story at sundown — hundreds of people had turned up with umbrellas, waiting in queue in the downpour for more than an hour to attend the first ever Kolkata premiere for Cat Sticks. The hall was jam packed with people and umbrellas, and the film did not disappoint the crowd!
Ronny Sen’s Cat Sticks is a chiaroscuro of several overlapping concepts, on the surface it might seem like a story about a bunch of brown sugar junkies over the course of one night, but it’s veins run way deeper. The reason why I am able to write about the film after almost two months of watching it, is because the film is woven with images so striking that their story embeds itself in the viewer’s mind and refuses to leave. The Director Ronny Sen’s background, as is evident from his Instagram page, is in fine arts photography and he pours his skills and experience into this project. I think of Cat Sticks as an array of images, starting right at the beginning when a bunch of junkies looking for a place to smoke up find an abandoned Kingfisher aircraft in a field swathed by rain, to the end where a man sits still with a raven perched atop him: a final foreboding that addicts are unmoving to death that has claimed them.
Cat Sticks is a story of running around to score and running from getting caught. It speaks of the late ’90s – early 2000’s Kolkata, but not the one belonging to gentlemen. The entire film takes place over the course of a night, where the characters present parts and pieces of their lives and unfold their stories. There is the Presidency student experimenting with the darker ways of life for reasons of his own, there is the junkie struggling with his riddles of family problems, there is the dealer who moves around dingy lanes in the lookout for customers, there is the cross-dresser who is denied her deserving respect, there is the actress getting caught in a director’s seductive traps, there is the rebel who locked up in his own house imagines a fight with his father in the bathroom, and there are so many others with their own share of stories. These are all belligerent people who are engrossed in their own battles against their heroin addiction, their personal lives, their dwindling sources of happiness, their crippling poverty, and not all of them would make it back to light. Ronny Sen dedicates the film to the people who were left behind in the dark.
“This is to call my dead friends back from the night.”
Cat Sticks may not have a gripping narrative that keeps the audience in track with all character arcs, but it sure does paint poignancy out of the grotesque and the damned. Perhaps the one scene that would pop up in every conversation about the film, is that of two addicts who strip naked trying to find unused veins in each others bodies to inject their next dose of smack. Under the moon-like halo of streetlamps, two bodies float around in empty space around each other like a dance that knows no bounds. The bodies become devices, the veins mere tools to climb the next high, and the serpent like movements in the surrounding blankness send shivers across the screen.
“You said you would show me the ocean. Why did you bring me to a river?”
The downpour is relentless, and so is the desire for heroin in the characters. The grunge background score by Oliver Weeks, the lights moving between spaces real and surreal, the precarious pleasures on screen and the actors’ convincing portrayal of an impending doom makes the honorable jury-mention at Slamdance (where it was the only Indian film this year), well deserved. Saurabh Saraswat, Kalpan Mitra, Joyraj Bhattacharya, Tanmay Dhanania all deliver their complex characters pretty well to the audience, and Shreya Dev Dubey’s striking cinematography deserves applause. I was also struck by how the film not only speaks about junkies in the foreground, but also focuses on a demographic that has fallen victim to the evils of capitalism. The bleeding man who runs around telling how he was castrated without being paid half of what he was promised, speaks volumes about the population that is isolated from the buzz of a city, left in dingy corners to rot and die, the people who no one would bat an eyelid for. So they grow desperate in relentless rage, and find the downward spiral of cheap synthetic drugs.
The film falls short at a small number of areas. With so many characters it feels a little dizzying and hard to discern one from another, more so because it is entirely shot in black and white. Some of the character arcs could be better explored and spent more time on, while a few seem a little dragged for the sake of aesthetics. Not all the characters find closure either, some just disappear by the end of the film. That might probably be intended because the story is only told over a single night. The discomfort left regarding the lost character arcs in the minds of the audience makes them find their own stories, and the director has thus fulfilled his promise of bringing his friends back from the dead.
“We are Robin Hoods, motherfucker!”
Cat Sticks is a chiaroscuro of love and loneliness, the latter pervading throughout as a delirium that each character is drowned in. The love is harder to discover, but once you strip yourself of judgement, privilege, responsibility and once you sit with that group of junkies on an empty Bypass field glowing with candles like fireflies, the innocence seizes in and when the smoke has settled, all that remains is the intense, aching love for losing oneself.
—Debmalya Bandyopadhyay
He can be reached here.
Images taken from the film’s Instagram page
