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Dreams and dilemmas at the Coffee House

Shoma A Chatterji

Star News recently beamed a programme on Calcutta's famous Coffee House, located at College Street.

There was no mention though of the fact that a full-length feature film on the same Coffee House had just bagged the Special Jury Award at the National Awards this year.

Kichhu Sanglap Kichhu Pralap, the original Bengali name of the film, translates into 'Dialogue and Delirium.' Directed by Ashoke Viswanathan under the banner of Drishyakavya, the film, is an interesting anti-narrative structure.

It revolves around the Coffee House in Calcutta -- the centre of sometimes aimless, mostly purposeless and often meaningless conversations, called adda in Bengali -- over endless cups of coffee drunk in the midst of blinding cigarette smoke.

"The word adda is almost untranslatable," says FTII graduate Ashoke, whose first full-length feature, Sunya Thekey Suru (Return to Zero) also won the President's Gold Medal for the best first film of a director in 1994.

The first time one steps into Coffee House, one is deafened by the rising crescendo of voices discussing everything from Madonna to Marx, from Kargil to Viagra to Amjad Ali Khan. One's eyes start smarting from the cigarette smoke. The tables could do with some polishing and preening, the waiters have faces irrigated with the experience of years gone by.

Moghlai parathas, breast cutlets, omelettes with bread slices make their magical appearance from an invisible kitchen, the tempting smell mingling with the fragrance of hot coffee and perfumes worn by women.

Every Calcutta-based Bengali -- from Satyajit Ray to Amartya Sen, from Jyoti Basu to Uttam Kumar, had at some time or other, been a permanent, unofficial member of this Coffee House adda. A typically Bengali phenomenon, adda is gradually becoming known all over the world.

Loosely, it means idle chatter. But it is much more than that. Adda is not supposed to serve any specific purpose. "It is perfectly useless and therein lies its attraction," says Ashoke. "Yet, there is a lot to gain from this debate. Friends are found and enemies created around Coffee House tables. Love stories are written and marriages destroyed. Many a creative endeavour -- from books to magazines to films -- has taken birth within the precincts of this Coffee House," he adds.

Perhaps to document the Coffee House in his own individualistic style, Ashoke was inspired to write the script of Dialogue and Delirium. It does not have a conventional storyline, yet several strands of stories of the main characters seem to grow out of the film, tangibly enough to make it appear like a fiction film.

Nor is it a documentary. Thus emerges a totally individualistic style of film-making, rooted in a setting known for its idle gossip, a place which forms the basis of unsung and unspun stories.

Newton, for example, a typical '60s character, spends most of his time chatting with friends and drinking umpteen cups of coffee. Ananya, a still photographer, is more than just a friend. Shyamal is an intellectual, Amal, a retired government servant, Biswajit, a corporate executive, and Tamal, an eccentric journalist. Then there is Labony, who was with Ananya in college and is now a popular actress of the Bengali screen.

Enter Arup, a mysterious character claiming to be a screenwriter. He is full of stories of his sojourns abroad and of his numerous connections. Introduced into Newton's circle by Labony, he volunteers to help Newton with his business plans.

Ashoke's forte lies in his experimentation with form and structure of the narrative in a feature film. In fact, his two films show that he is striving to discover a form through which the content will evolve naturally and take its own independent shape.

He telescoped his narrative back and forth and reversed the colour coding for his first film, evolving an unusual flashback structure. The film was awarded the Silver Torchlight for being the Second Best Feature Film at the Pyongyang International Film Festival in 1994.

In Kicchu Sanglap Kichhu Pralap, he breaks the narrative completely, placing the focus of his film on the famous Coffee House. Using an anchor to introduce the main characters of his story, Ashoke sits back and allows his characters almost to create their own respective stories, and in doing so, links them to each other.

Ashoke is the son of N Viswanathan, a character actor of the Bengali screen, who made his debut in Ray's Kanchenjungha. Ashoke has produced and directed more than 75 projects for television, government agencies and corporate bodies.

Among these, the ones he likes to mention are a nine-part documentary serial in English for Doordarshan called Theatre Through The Ages in 1996, a 13-part fictional serial in Bengali for Zee Television called Blind Lane in 1994, a 30-minute telefilm in Hindi called Adhura Swapna in 1995, Calcutta: Twenty-Four Hours, a 20-minute documentary in English for Doordarshan and Ekmatra Bikalpa (The Only Alternative) a 25-minute promotional film on electoral conduct last year.

"The riotous laughter and endless chatter can leave you cold and unmoved when you fail to find a sympathetic vibration in the repetitive patterns of conversations around you," he explains, talking about his new film. "All this and more, I have strived to capture through a narrative, or rather, through a lack of it, bringing in slices of real life through the characters."

A Mathematics graduate from St Xavier's College, Ashoke joined the FTII where he graduated with film direction in 1985. Since then, he has been active in both film, theatre and television as director, writer and actor.

In Kichhu Sanglap... too, he portrays the character of Arup, who vascillates between truth and untruth, between illusion and reality, and also between dreams and nightmares.

The film is extremely fluid in movement and style, moving spatially beyond a time-warp to reach out to infinity. This infectious fluidity of the narrative touches the characters too, resulting in colouring them in all hues and shades of the rainbow -- no blacks or whites, but shades of grey with other colours thrown in for good measure.

So, there are no heroes, no villains and no character actors either. Even Arup, who turns out to be a fake towards the end of the film, turns up again at the Coffee House to settle down to idle chatter, thus reducing the goings-on into one big fictitious joke.

The film ends. Perhaps, another will begin from there.