Mark Wood Sadik Ahmed's debut feature length film is set in Doulathpur - a fictional, small, remote shanty town in rural Bangladesh. On Independence Day, Kala (Tanveer Hassan)a former soldier and atheist arrives in town carrying a rifle, a frayed birth certificate and an old photograph of a woman. The voice of Waris (Tanju Miah)a young orphan boy who works in the local tea house narrates the film. We learn that Kala is on a personal quest to find his father, reclaim his birth-right, discover the truth about the rape and murder of his mother and to take revenge on those responsible. When he first arrives in town Kala is hungry, penniless and disturbed.Kala soon discovers that the community is dominated by two powerful figures who are locked in a bitter power struggle. Thakur (Tariq Anam Khan)is an ageing, old-fashioned, crippled, wealthy landlord who owns much of the surrounding land. Thakur is also the only Hindu in a Muslim community and knowing his life is drawing to a close and he is the last of his line he has begun an obsessive plan to build a lasting monument, a Hindu temple commemorating his once powerful family - something seen as idolatry by the locals. To do this Thakur has begun ruthlessly repossessing land from his debt-ridden tenants thus further isolating him from the local community.Thakur's rival is a populist, ruthless, corrupt Muslim politician and village boss known as Chairman (Ahmed Rubel). Chairman is a seductive, charming philanderer who likes everyone to call him "father" - except of course the actual children he has fathered around town. Following a, probably rigged, local election Chairman has cemented his position as the leading figure in the Muslim community and makes much of his intent to represent and defend HIS people. However, spurred on by his Lady Macbeth like wife (Reetu Abdus Sattar)Chairman is plotting to capitalise on Thakur's decline and isolation to muscle in on his territory by killing him.The arrival of the gun-wielding Kala is seen by Thakur and Chairman as a potential tipping point in their dispute and both attempt to woo the newcomer. Over the course of 12 hours - Dawn to Dusk - Kala plays off both men whilst edging closer to gaining the information he seeks to uncover the truth about his past. The film builds to an outbreak of bloody violence between the three men at its climax.Sadik Ahmed makes good use of the location to form the backdrop for what has unfortunately become billed as a "Spaghetti Eastern". In particular the remains of a former Maharajah's mansion outside the real life town of Daulatpur which acts as Thakur's home. Kishon Khan's excellent award-winning music also adds to the atmosphere of the film. The story of a mysterious stranger in a small town who plays two rival factions off against each other is not a new one. There are obvious influences from Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" and Hill's "Last Man Standing". With Chairman's ambitious, scheming wife urging him on to murder also echoing Macbeth. However, not just the Bangladeshi backdrop gives Ahmed's film a distinctive identity of its own. The story touches upon some interesting and challenging topics, from the genocide and war rapes of the 1971 War of Independence with Pakistan to ethnic and religious tensions in modern-day Bangladesh.The choice of Tanju Miah to play the child narrator, Waris is also interesting - not least because he was the real life subject of Ahmed's previous short film "Tanju Miah". Waris is an unreliable narrator though, he is under the thrall of the popular Chairman and on more than one occasion events depicted in the film do not tally with Waris' description of them. Other themes touched upon include man's mortality and the need to leave a lasting remembrance as death approaches, the conflict between the modern and the traditional and corruption and the power and influence money can buy.However, "The Last Thakur" is hamstrung throughout by poor, plodding pacing. Ahmed seeks to build tension with scenes such as that of Kala sitting outside the tea house obsessively examining and caressing each individual bullet. These scenes are too frequent and slow the film down. The film is dominated by repetitive shots of Kala wandering backwards and forwards between locations. Despite the small-scale setting and close proximity of the rival factions Kala seems to spend much of the film trudging through the dusty landscape to play out one scene at a location before trudging off again back to where he has just come from. The pacing of the film is a major negative and the film seems longer than it's 81 minute running time. This is emphasised when the film comes to a sudden, violent conclusion after all this languid pacing. Still, there is enough here to show that Ahmed has talent and ideas and it is to be hoped that his future films will be more successful at pacing the telling of the story.

johnnyboyz I wanted to like The Last Thakur more than I did. I enjoyed the individual look of the piece, the ominous and oddly hued cinematography acting as an effective aesthetic for this threatening and tension filled piece to play out behind of; I enjoyed individual scenes and sequences in the film but none of it amounted to anything bar an out of the blue and conventional shootout. There was no meat on the bone; no consistent enough feed of threat nor terror running parallel to the intriguing premise of having a drifting, mysterious loner drop into the middle of a Bangladeshi turf war in a sleepy; lonely village. The film clocks in at under eighty odd minutes, it felt a lot longer; it was repetitive, all too often relying on imagery without engaging nor doing anything else. For a film all about the hostilities between two sides and the supposed hatred and tension that's born out of that, it was surprisingly plodding and sparse of dramatic punch, despite the enemies being in relatively close proximity to one another for most of the time and despite a relatively unhinged persona the film instills within its lead. I haven't seen any of writer/director Sadik Ahmed's other work, regardless, I get the feeling I might enjoy some of what else he's made.The film is narrated to us by a young boy in said Bangladeshi village, it's post-election so I think there's meant to be some sort of substance there to do with a new post political order, but it isn't really touched upon for the rest of the film. In filtering this story through the perspective of a young boy, we're enabled a third person angle of the three parties of the piece: two leaders of rival factions and a lone man who waltzes into the midst of a territorial disagreement they're having caring a rifle and a photograph of a woman he's out to avenge the brutalisation of. Its routine set up and consequent labellings of it being a western places it within a respective field of genre, and its reliance on the age-old plot point towards the end of a character observing a photograph so as to further the narrative, twinned with the fact the lead is on a ready made arc of revenge, are not original items, nor are they made particulalry exciting here. Oddly twinned with this, Ahmed is interested in going against set type in creating mood and sequences that do not advance narrative or character progression (the fact he's essentially working with archetypes here is also prominent), in that sequences displaying the characters just existing where it is that they stand are lingered on so as to build a sense of threat.The first time we see the lead, he is asleep on a bench later going on to arise and take to life in this village. The resting on a bench before awakening symbolic of the character's pre-film slumber prior to undertaking this goal; his awakening and entering into this world additionally captured as he enters the place he'll find his retribution. He carries with him a rifle and a number of individual bullets, sitting outside tea huts amidst the dusty Bangladeshi setting and fondling each bullet miraculously and thoroughly. Ahmed knows that one gun between several people but in the hands of a lone individual is much more exciting than hundreds of guns in the hands of dozens of people spraying hundreds of bullets around as seen in most popular American (or Americanised) films about revenge or similar hostilities. Here, the lead is fighting the reputations of those who might or might not get in his way and that particular sense of threat is relatively effective enough.The two warring sides are fighting over territory. They are Ahmed Rubel's Chairman and Tariq Anam Khan's Thakur, with the Thakur wanting to build a temple on land he doesn't actually own, something not advised given this rooted hatred between the two is born out of the fact either party are Muslim and Hindu, respectively, as money is additionally used as a tool to ignite a power-play between a leader and those that live in close proximity. This power-play between construction and religion; Muslim and Hindu is somewhat glanced over by the arrival of the rifle wielding loner, a man looking for his own brand of justice amidst everything else playing out. The mood is there in The Last Thakur, that isolated and distanced sense that everything might just fly off the rails; unfortunately, we are too distanced from proceedings, never given much time to invest the lead's plight nor care for either of the feuding Muslim and Hindu sides - a feud running on tension born out of whatever knowledge of Hindu and Muslim rivalries the viewer carries. The menace that ought to be there more than it is seems to be comes and goes. Rival groups share a general area together for a while, and when we realise nothing will come of it, all sense of being immersed evaporates.The film culminates in a bloody shootout which is rather jarring, although not in an entirely good sense, in that it completely flies against what we've been provided for the last hour in tone and mood. Additionally, the child narrator comes across as far more advanced and informed on proceedings than he really ought to be, suggesting at least to me that it was initially to be narrated by the lone adult lead we observe but was consequently changed to a child's voice at a later date so as to inject more of a sense of soul and heart. What consensus can I reach? I liked certain things: Ahmed directs rather competently while his cinematographer does a good job; and yet there's a detached sense about the film, as if alienation from hostilities and violence is on the film's agenda but within that, alienation from the audience is a result.

ss336 This is an awesome movie. All of the nonsense and kitschness of Indian cinema is absent in this Bangladeshi masterpiece: no songs, no OTT costumes and no ridiculous love themes. It owes a lot to the old Kurosawa movies Sanjuro and Yojimbo, from which it draws considerable inspiration. The use of the tea house as a plot device holding the narrative together is just short of genius, and very tasteful, reminding one of the old-time classics of Indian cinema and bringing a sense of the culture of the place.Unfortunately certain things, probably best left to the imagination, are left unclear by the end of the movie. However, the Tao is clearly a central theme: one of the main protagonists asks a tea boy whether he is a truly evil man, and clearly the viewer is meant to consider this difficult question. It also deals with the difficult matter of the modernisation of south Asia, and handles the conflict between traditionalism and modernisation quite skilfully. Tradition and modernity blend together, and by the end one has the impression that the old ways to a considerable extent underpin the forces behind what appears to be new, unwelcome and alien.This movie will stand the test of time much better than the expensive and overly self-conscious pseudo-epics such as Jodhaa Akbar, Asoka and Kshatriya. My one criticism is that it does seem to be rather clumsy when dealing with Hindu-Muslim tension, and turns out being rather one-sided, exalting one side rather unrealistically. Or perhaps this is better seen as a class war than a religious tension: the Thakur lord versus the Muslim man of the people. The director leaves this distinction up to the viewer to a limited extent.