A Puttanna homage 43 years on

Rishab Shetty’s anthology film is made with better tech and the expectations are that much higher

A web search for the earliest anthology films in Indian cinema throws up one or two results from the 1930s and 1940s (‘Sirikkadhey’, ‘Mani Maalai’). They were comedy dramas meant solely to entertain the masses. Any deliberate experimentation with the sub-genre only began much later in the 2000s.

An anthology is a compilation of several short films, usually tied together by a single theme or premise with each one directed by a different person. The Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam
film industries have dabbled in anthologies enough times — clubbing it with horror, thriller, and more recently, slice of life genres — to familiarise the Indian audiences with it. Think ‘Dus Kahaniyaan’, ‘Bombay Talkies’, ‘Lust Stories’, ‘Kerala Cafe’, ‘Aviyal’, ‘Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum’, among many others.

The Kannada film industry, however, is far behind having produced very few anthologies so far — foremost being the legendary Puttanna Kanagal’s 1976 classic ‘Katha Sangama’.
Forty-three years later, the Kannada film industry has seen the release of another anthology by the same name.

Dedicated to Kanagal, who introduced this genre to Kannadigas, the ‘Katha Sangama’of 2019 is a “confluence” of seven short stories directed by seven directors. The film also has seven cinematographers, musicians and editors. And the main man helming this ambitious project is Rishab Shetty.

The seven shorts are varied in theme — a rural woman navigating a megapolis, a father-daughter relationship, a pre-Independence tale, a love story, a conversational drama, a young woman stranded with a flat tyre, a man on the brink of retirement. Every team has also used a different approach and narrative technique, right from the choice of genres (realism, fantasy, thriller, magic realism) to using non-actors, a script without dialogues and different Kannada dialects for the characters.

There have been precedents, of course. Rohit Padaki’s well-received Dayavittu Gamanisi (2017) was an anthology with a hyperlink across the four shorts.

Tharun Sudhir’s 'Chowka' (2017), though not an anthology, had five writers, five cinematographers and five music composers, and had a great run of 100 days in the theatres.

A regular feature has a comprehensive story and script that is handled by one director. It’s her vision and solely under her control. An anthology, on the other hand, with all its moving parts of directors and artistes, is a tricky territory.

An inadequately fleshed-out script or a slight deviation from the overarching theme may result in the film appealing to the audience only in parts. The risks are high, but the opportunity
to engage the audience with everyday stories of ordinary people through a novel form of storytelling seems to have driven Rishab and his team.

Kanagal’s ‘Katha Sangama’brought to screen three short stories by young writers of his time. A man used to being behind the cameras, Kanagal appears on-screen to tell his audience that the film is “an attempt to introduce Kannada’s rich contemporary literature to the common masses through the medium best known to him”. He also introduces the writers before each short begins.

Several decades on, Rishab has it easier. He doesn’t need to convince an audience, fed by a constant stream of disruptive OTT content, why his film has seven different stories. He has better technology and resources to make a film and an even better tool in social media to promote it. But that is also why this tribute to Kanagal will have to work that much harder to deliver.

While the regular Kannada movie-goer is more open than ever before, there seems to be a code that filmmakers need to crack to deliver niche content and also rake in numbers.

Rakshit Shetty’s ‘Ulidavaru Kandante’(2014) has a cult status among Kannada cine buffs today. But when the movie was released in 2014, it sank at the box office despite its fresh content and sound technicality. Similar is the case with Rishab’s ‘Ricky’(2016), which was touted as a commercial movie but didn’t largely satisfy the single-screen audience.

‘Katha Sangama’holds the promise of experimental storytelling by new directors. One may also need to look out for the music by some of Karnataka’s finest young composers. By striking a mass-class balance with his films such as ‘Kirik Party’, ‘Bell Bottom’ and ‘Sarkari Hi. Pra. Shaale, Kasaragodu’, Rishab has already made a name for himself as an actor, director and producer who can draw audience to the theatres. And that is the hope for ‘Katha Sangama’as well.

(The author is a journalist)