AKA The Land of Cards

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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq “Q” Mukherjee

FEATURING:Joyraj Bhattacharya, Rii Sen, Soumyak Kante De Biswas, Anubrata Basu, Tinu Verghese

PLOT: An exiled prince escapes from confinement, only to arrive in a strange land where all the residents dress as military regiments of playing cards; meanwhile, a writer struggles to imagine an screen adaptation of this story.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Tasher Desh is a fascinating example of a weird movie that manages to get weirder entirely through attitude. The land of the playing-card people and their lockstep behavior is plenty strange, but the movie treats their situation with a baroque intensity, a gravity that overwhelms everything that has preceded it. One kind of strange is replaced with another, and an emotional ache that completely changes the viewing experience.

COMMENTS: When last we met up with Q, he was sharing the adventures of a Kolkata street rat turned hardcore rapper. His adventurous tale carved out a niche distinct from his colleagues in the Indian film industry, eschewing colorful dances and crowd-pleasing romance in favor of drugs, hardcore sex, and verses spat out with boundless anger. So when we begin Tasher Desh by meeting a screenwriter who has been tasked with adapting Rabindrath Tagore’s 80-year-old play about a fantastical land where the population paints their faces white and assumes the roles of a platoon of playing cards, the writer’s confusion would seem to be a conduit for that of Q himself. Is this really his kind of film? Can he make the pivot from raw vérité to classic adaptation? The answer is, of course. The man’s a professional. But rest assured, it will not look anything like you’d suspect. Q is gonna Q. 

Tasher Desh spends its first hour establishing a mood of expectation. We hang out with the Prince and his retinue in their large but sparse prison, a cage that would be gilded if it were not made of rock and decorated with only the barest of furnishings, for a remarkably long time. The Prince chats with his mother, ignores his bevy of female attendants, sits around with his aide-de-camp, and plays marathon games of table tennis. Whatever he has done to merit this punishment (and the film is wisely silent on the subject), it’s a dreary fate. That he will want to escape seems a foregone conclusion.

Juxtaposed with the Prince’s misery is that of the screenwriter, who seems to learn the story and script the film in real time. Both men search for something to make sense of everything: for the Prince, an encounter with an exotic fortune teller seals the deal, while the screenwriter similarly meets a mysterious woman who shows him the way.

Here, halfway through the film, it’s fair to wonder who is the dog and who is the tail. The Prince and his pal wash up on an unfamiliar shore, and we immediately encounter the squadron of card people, a live-action version of the Red Queen’s brigade. They are stripped of all identity: hair hidden under a cap, clad in red and black uniforms, eyes concealed behind thick goggles, with their faces painted white and suits painted upon their lips. Only the numbers on their epaulets distinguish them. Their speech is captioned onscreen in bold all-caps blocks that threaten to fill half the screen. They are strange, single-minded, and fiercely xenophobic as they prepare to execute the newly arrived Prince. It’ll take some fancy speechifying to get out of this mess. Luckily for the Prince, he’s got that arrow in his quiver. 

There’s something delightfully demented about the seriousness with which Q treats this absurd premise. It’s not clear why the Prince’s words are so motivating, but maybe he’s the first voice of opposition the card people have ever encountered. Regardless, the speech ushers in an awakening that shatters the worldview of everyone on the island. The Prince and his story are essentially done with at this point, and we’re left with the cards—especially the female cards—and the existential earthquake they face. For some, it is a sexual awakening, for others, a crisis of identity. It’s a huge pivot, and Q treats this shift with the solemnity and intensity that follows a long-drawn out war. 

With multiple inspirations from literature, stage, and screen, Tasher Desh could be called derivative. Yet the sources are so many and so disparate that trying to tease them out ends up feeling foolish. The Tempest meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets Adaptation meets Lysistrata meets Pleasantville… trying to find a true antecedent is absurd. You’re better off with a different analogue altogether: it’s a Cobb salad, a track off Paul’s Boutique, a Rauschenberg montage. It synthesizes a diverse array of elements into something barely resembling its source material, something wholly new and strange. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…not just a movie, but a surreal fever dream that completely rewired my brain…  while it might look like a straightforward ‘weird’ movie, ‘The Land of Cards’ is smarter than that. It’s a full-blown political allegory that isn’t afraid to question conformity, social structures, and the power of art.” – Brittany Vincent, Tom’s Guide

(This movie was nominated for review by debasish dey. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Where to watch The Land of Cards [Tasher Desh]