“All my films are a result of failures,” says Q. “Every time I failed at something, my response was to make a film.” Little wonder that the 53-year-old Bengali filmmaker is one of India’s foremost chroniclers of failed youth. Q’s protagonists are unheroic but cannot stop dreaming of heroism. Their mad journeys are punctuated by Q’s trademark sensibilities—explicit sex, gory violence, dark humour, and political pointedness—making him some sort of an auteur, a filmmaker with a consistent personal vision.
Q’s claim to infame, Gandu(2010), was about an urban loafer fantasising about being a hotshot rapper. Tasher Desh(2012), a trippy reimagining of the antifascist Rabindranath Tagore play of the same name, followed a disillusioned prince who travels to a regimented nation where he sets everyone free from a despot. Brahman Naman(2016)—Netflix’s first Indian release—involved three male quizzers high on their caste superiority and low on confidence out of sexual frustration. Garbage(2018) was the story of a depraved and depressed Hindu right-wing cabbie who keeps a woman captive in his home.
With the exception of Tasher Desh, none of his films received a theatrical release. Gandufeatured unsimulated sex. Brahman Naman had its protagonist fornicating with a fridge, a ceiling fan, and his pet fish. Garbageclimaxed with the protagonist’s victim raping him with a dildo. Add a surreal arthouse style to the mix, with jarring editing as if the camera has ADHD, and Q becomes box-office poison—while accruing the legend of being an uncompromising enfant terrible.
Underneath his loud filmmaking style are stories of young men trapped inside themselves, clawing at their walls to escape. His latest, Deshlai(meaning matchstick), an Indo-Bangladesh production due for release soon, is no different. Bangladeshi TikToker Zewel (Sizu Shahriar) wishes to transform from “zero” to “hero” before flying off to Qatar where he hopes he will be an online superstar. Circumstances get him running off to Kolkata. With the Chinese social media platform banned in India, he gets his hero moment by standing up to a sadistic businessman who runs an influencer farm while falling for a K-pop fan.
A still from the film Deshlai. Sizu Shahriar plays Zewel, a Bangladeshi TikToker.
| Photo Credit:
By Special Arrangement
In a conversation with Frontline, Q discussed his new film, his transformation from Koushik Mukherjee to the single-alphabet cult figure, and the future of community-based alternative culture in India. Edited excerpts:
A TikToker hero, a K-pop-loving heroine, a villain who is an entrepreneur in the influencer industry. Deshlaiis clearly a film of its time. But it also has a traditional hero’s journey, not unlike Baashha or the Clint Eastwood Westerns such films drew from: an apparent nobody in a foreign land recalls his past upon encountering violence again and stands out as a hero. What was the genesis of Deshlai?
My career began in the early 2000s and came full circle with Netflix opening its Indian account by distributing my film Brahman Naman in 2016. Up until 2016, the style that my films are accused of was found vulgar or indecent by tastemakers. So my reaction became, okay, I will make it more stylised and vulgar. Then, the aspect of storytelling became a lifestyle, an identity, an artistic spirit for me. I was clear from the beginning about the sociopolitical history of my aesthetic: underground, alternative, punk—and that the establishment won’t like it.
Around 2016, the world began changing in every manner, above all, politically. This is the time I had moved out of Kolkata and shifted to Goa, hoping to find like-minded people there. During this time, I made Garbage. I began wondering what’s the point of storytelling in adult life. And can I be a storyteller for adults?
Post-Garbage, once I had gotten my rage out, COVID-19 happened. Post-COVID 19, a new shift came. We were in a tech-zamindari where technology was so democratised, everybody had the power to tell stories audiovisually. This is how I got interested in the world of microcreators. The lowest strata of society could now have their voice heard. This interested me alongside the manufactured vaudeville of Korean pop music.
These made me consider the matter of storytelling again. And from here, Deshlaiwas born. I was inspired by the Zewels of society. They earn from it, they get social acknowledgement from it, they often fail. But failure is not a tragedy. They turn failure into content too. With this, I combined a story I had about a boy from Bangladesh crossing the border into India. The film became clear to me once I wrote the two songs, “Deshlai” and “Pinik” [meaning “mind trip”].
That you find a film’s rhythm after creating the songs is interesting. Tell me about how your creative spirit developed over decades. How did you become Q from Koushik da?
Koushik da used to be in ads. He was trying to be cool. But he is Bengali. He understood he can’t be cool in Kolkata. So he travelled to Delhi and Mumbai to work. I was good in ads. Failures ace in ads. Good boys become doctors and engineers.
Koushik da was doing well. It was a good job and I found many interesting mentors there. They understood that I have a knack for visual imagination. At the time, my ambition was to become a creative director of an ad firm by 25. I got to shoot and direct some ads too then. Life was headed up the corporate ladder, and then Goa happened. I could always sing and play guitar; I was often a backup singer for rock bands back in the city. But after Goa, music became central to my life. The kind of people I met there made me realise becoming Koushik da was a trap.
Another big thing that happened was I got a job in a Sri Lankan ad agency. I immediately moved to Colombo and got hooked to international cinema thanks to a video parlour. I was introduced to films like Run Lola Run and Visitor Q—that’s where I took my moniker from. I consider Takashi Miike my father and Pier Paolo Pasolini my mother.
Then I got back to Kolkata, tried making films, failed again and again, untilLe Pocha, my documentary on the Bangla rock scene, happened. After every failure, I’d want to make a crowd-pleaser. Le Pocha was that. For me, making likeable films is not a problem. I come from ads. The problem is not liking something but still watching it. Could I make such films?
Q, born Koushik Mukherjee, uses the single-letter moniker as roleplay, saying that you need to separate your social and artistic identity.
| Photo Credit:
Pratidhani
Why did you need a moniker?
That’s role-play. It’s common in Bengali art and culture. Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay wrote under the pen name Bonophool. Uttam Kumar is a moniker. When you’re deciding to make art in society, you need to separate your social identity from your artistic identity. Or else you will get depressed. Any artist who stayed in Bengal and tried to create alternative art got depressed. Ritwik Ghatak, Gautam Chattopadhyay. Earlier we didn’t discuss mental health. Now we are. Since the 70s, the pattern has been that each decade, Bengal got fantastic alternative artists. But either they sell out, leave art, or die horrible deaths.
An author like humourist Shibram Chakraborty is rare; writing about himself in the third person by delinking artistic self from his social self. Without it, it’s difficult to avoid depression.
In June, some of the finest global Bengali artists from across the world, including underground Bengali musicians, made their debut at SXSW London. There is no idea of these people here in Kolkata or West Bengal. Only when such artists die, does everyone make a sad face, cry their hearts out, and write tributes. I am on Shibram’s side. This life is a hard life. Tackle it with comedy.
What was life before Ganduand Le Pocha like?
I was planning to adapt the Bengali folk tales collection Thakumar Jhuli in Dogme 95 style. Those days, I was hanging around in the industry with red hair, green hair, wearing dungarees, talking of making “digital films”. I was practically untouchable then.
AfterLe Pocha happened and my documentary Love in India got the National Film Award, things began looking up. I was working on a really complex project called Sari, about the history and the present-day politics of the garment. Our project got featured at Sunny Side of the Doc as a mid-festival showstopper.
Turned out somebody in the embassy didn’t staple the visa to the passport. We didn’t get the visa on time and couldn’t make it to France. Then we wondered: who is the gandu, the embassy guy or me, who thought life was finally being positive?
Then I conceptualised Ganduas a so-called crowd-pleaser—thirty minutes of a sad-sack story, followed by someone showing the character’s dreams, and from then on it’s a manipulative, crowd-pleasing story of an underdog. I suppose we made it in more than three-four lakhs in those days.
Why the decision to leave Kolkata and move to Goa in the mid-2010s? You stopped making Bengali films.
A golden age of indie film was blooming in India around the mid-2010s, right when I made Brahman Naman. A lot of work that had been done in the preceding years was building up to this, and Netflix was central to this moment. That boom wasn’t allowed to develop and go further. Indian mainstream doesn’t let other genres thrive.
After GanduandLove in India, I did get the opportunity to move to Berlin or Toronto and develop a career. But I did not want to be a weekend filmmaker there. AfterBrahman Namangot picked up by Netflix at Sundance, I was given a tour of the Hollywood studios, with the hope that I would sign a deal. Many times, a contract is signed but the film never goes on floors and the director is stuck.
What I was looking for was the position to stay independent. I kept visiting Goa during the preparation ofBrahman Naman, and soon I realised I might as well live here. I moved into the old house of Goa Foundation’s Norma Alvares, the ex-Supreme Court lawyer, from the first family of Goan activists. My partner lived in Mumbai. Besides, if I had to stay back in Kolkata, I had to become a dada.
What do you mean by ‘dada’?
Dada in Bengal is a revered position of a deeply patriarchal nature, someone who becomes a position of authority in some way for some achievement, and then he needs to amplify the achievement and position it correctly to become the correct dada. The dada culture comes partly from a crafty implementation of literary characters like Ghona da and Teni da who had a group of young men always hanging about them to take notes on what to do in life. Ghona da onwards, through Satyajit Ray’s Felu da, down to the explosion of the ‘70s Bengali civil culture, where lumpen bhodroloks became authority figures—small Trumpian figures who could say and get away with anything, dadas became ubiquitous in Bengal. I wanted to avoid this.
Online influencers, unlike dadas, are not infallible. The shelf life of social media is small. If social media dadas are not delivering content continuously, they fade away.
A still from Deshlai.The film will be released in theatres.
| Photo Credit:
By Special Arrangement
When and why did you return to Kolkata and Bengali films?
The most active movements happening today in the world are in independent music. Culture is now forming around music as a community-based, hyperlocal situation, not cinema anymore. My new company Oddspace is a 360-degree content and culture company that not only provides a physical space for performances by rising underground and independent acts in the country but the plan is to create a catalogue of so much independent music that everything falls into place just around that. The music of Deshlaiis among our first releases. I returned to Kolkata to reimagine creativity and creative work in a new way a little more than a year back. The idea was to build a community space, not just make films.
You plan to release Deshlaiin theatres?
With most of the funding for films coming from streamers, and traditional producers and financiers disappearing, we have lost connect with the theatre-first audience. Now, I was always being told I am an international filmmaker whose films don’t come in theatres. But people watch my films online and have a gala trip. So why not, for once, release my film directly in theatres and get back that audience? They have fun in their rooms with my films, now they can have fun together under one roof.
Devarsi Ghosh is a journalist and critic from Kolkata. He writes on films, music, books, and art.
