SIGHT AND SOUND
JULY 2009

By Michael Brooke

At first glance, Sadik Ahmed’s micro budget debut feature appears to be yet another
quasi-Western drawing on a decidedly familiar servant of two masters’ model.
And since Ahmed cannot realistically match Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo (1961),
Sergio Lenoe’s A fistful of Dollars (1964) or Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996)
for production values, it’s tempting to assume The Last Thakur will be redundant
from the start. Actually, it’s one of the most confident British feature debuts since
Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior (2001), with which it shares an Asian location and
foreign language (Bangladesh and Bengali in this instance) and a welcome belief
in the primacy of visual storytelling.
Indeed, much of the ostensibly explanatory narration by ten year old Waris (Tanju Miah)
proves unreliable, given his slavish loyalty to Chairman (Ahmed Rubel) , the recently
elected Doulathpur village mayor. Waris won’t breathe a word of criticism even when
Chairman resorts to murder to secure political advantage, while landowner
Thakur (Tariq Anam) is a ‘madman’ and apparently the single obstacle to securing peace
in the region. Almost entirely friendless, apart from the blind Mustafa (who nontheless sees
much more than Waris), Thakur systematically buys up debts, takes possession of villagers’
land and uses it to construct a Hindu temple, studded with statues glorifying the female form.
In a largely Muslim community, this makes him a social and spiritual menace as well as a
capitalist threat.
Another potential threat is recent arrival Kala (Tanveer Hasan), a self declared atheist with
a rifle – which, as the perspicacious Chairman correctly observes, makes him doubly
dangerous through being open to offers from the highest bidder. Kala is duly taken
into Thakur’s employment as his personal bodyguard, but proves a tough negotiator,
waiting until he might actually have to use the gun before telling Thakur that his agreed
daily fee doesn’t include ammunition.
But Kala is hardly a man with no name in the Mifune Toshiro/Clint Eastwood mould,
since his purpose in coming to Doulathpur is to establish his own identity by tracking down
the man who raped his mother 30 years earlier. He bridles at being called ‘son’ by older
strangers, though Chairman proves equally sensitive about this in reverse, being not just one of
Kala’s prime suspects but also the father of a secret love-child.
There’s something too between Chairman and his chief henchman Tanju (Anisur Rahman Milon):
is he also a blood realtion or is this merely wishful thinking on the ambitious but ineffective
Tanju’s part?
Ahmed trained as a cinematographer, and retains that role on The Last Thakur, shooting in
widescreen through very long lenses, suggesting that villagers in the far distance are eavesdropping
on proceedings. It’s a not dissimilar technique to that used by Miklós Jancsó in masterpieces such as Round-up (1966) where the seemingly infinite expanse of the hungarian puszta becomes
paradoxically claustrophobic, as it offers no apparent hiding place.
(Quite how Chairman has managed to conceal his mistress and their child for three years is never explained, though it’s another string to his Machiavellian bow).
The handling of extras and background atmospherics is particularly impressive on such limited resources.
Doulathpur rings completely true as a living, working environment,
with Chairman regularly breaking off from sotto voce plotting for another meet ‘n’ greet wlakabout.
Production and sound designers Byron Broadbent and Kieron Teather share a screen credit, acknowledging their equaly vital input, while Kishon Khan and Birger Clausen’s score fuses
Western and Asian elements to subtly insinuating effect. The first product of an initiative between
Curzon Artificial Eye and the National Film and Television School to fund recent graduates’
small-scale features and guarantee their distribution, it’s a most effective calling card.