Beware, tigers!
The cinematography is good, no doubt. But it is not really about how good the sound or the visual effect is when you are making a film on the tigers of the Sundarbans, a globally endangered species.
What Kamal Sadanah shows in his debut film, Roar- Tigers of the Sundarbans, is outrageous to the point of condoning a form of machismo that encourages killing tigers and other wild animals. In other words, the film nurtures a motif that is illegal according to Bangladesh Wild Life Conservation Act 2012.
Granted it is not a documentary and any director can exercise his liberty in a feature film, Sadanah's storyline is seriously flawed as far as portrayal of the Bengal tigers is concerned.
The storyline of the 153-minute movie, now being screened in the capital, is full of wrong information about the Sundarbans and misconceptions about Bengal tigers. It portrays the majestic Bengal tigers demonically with an image that all tigers of the Sundarbans are man-eaters.
The story begins with a photographer named Uday who rescues a white tiger cub from a poacher's trap in the Sundarbans. He takes the cub along to a camp he has pitched near the forest. But the cub's mother, an albino tigress (white animals are called albino), prowls around Uday's camp, kills him and disappears into the mangrove forest with his body.
The plot then turns to Pundit, a commando officer and also brother of Uday. Played by Avinava Sukla, Pundit is determined to recover Uday's body and kill the tigress in retaliation. But the lady forest officer tells him that it won't be possible as "the case was closed".
That's precisely where the storyline fails to uphold a moral that should not be lost sight of, while dealing with a critically endangered species. No sane person would risk his life and go looking for a tigress in a tiger reserve forest to seek revenge, especially when the animal has killed a person for taking its cub away.
Pundit nonetheless decides to avenge his brother's death. Of course, he cannot do it alone. So he takes along a group of commandos armed with machine guns, revolvers, commando knives etc.
Then we see Jhumpa, the strangely dressed girl, who is to help them track the tigress down. It should be noted that her father too was killed by a tiger.
They roam around the forest, carrying a piece of cloth soaked with the cub's blood to attract the tigress.
All of a sudden, the bare-chested commandos are chased by what looks like hundreds of larger-than-usual cobras. So they run through the stilt-like roots of a mangrove area and along the muddy bank of the narrow canals! One is expected to overlook these humanly impossible feats in a feature film. Be that as it may, they finally meet the tigress in a teak forest.
They have already set a trap there, using their boatman as bait to allure the tigress.
But to the commandos' nightmare, she does not only escape the trap but also teams up with other tigers living in the forest to turn the tables on Pundit. The tigers counter-attack and fiercely kill many of the commandos.
After watching the film, what strikes one most is the misleading portrayal of the majestic Bengal tigers: they are not a territorial animal; they rather roam around in a group like wolves. They can even climb trees like leopards!
The most shocking characteristic they are attributed with is: they don't hunt deer and wild boar, they only hunt humans and live on human flesh!
The director even provides a theory about why all tigers of the Sundarbans become man-eaters. According to this theory, dead bodies from rivers and during cyclones come floating in the mangrove areas of the Sundarbans and the starving tigers, unable to hunt, eat those corpses to survive.
The director does not forget to introduce a group of poachers in the film. Veera is the leader of the poacher group and all his aides have been killed by tigers. Now he stays on tree branches and comes down on the ground only to misguide the commandos.
True, there are poachers in the Sundarbans who are posing the greatest threat to the tigers. But no poacher staying on tree branches has ever been heard of by anyone except in their wildest dreams.
Some parts of the film were shot in the Kotka reserve forest. The sound effects, background scores, visual effects and cinematography -- especially the aerial shots of the Sundarbans -- are undoubtedly commendable.
But that does not justify the fact that the director has actually misrepresented the Sundarbans and demonised the Bengal tiger to suit his purpose of creating a plot that intends more to horrify the viewers for commercial purposes than to present the tigers' power in an artistic way. This will surely send a wrong message to the viewers especially when Bangladesh and India are making joint efforts to save this endangered species of the cat family.
This is not to say a feature film or any medium of art for that matter cannot use the tiger's power in a fictionally potential way to add some new dimension to the story. What better example is there than the recent feature film The Life of Pie by Ang Lee where a Bengal tiger becomes an integral part of the plot and is fictionalised with all its power retained uniquely? That, however, must not be done to turn an endangered species into an enemy of the human race.
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