Cat Sticks (2019)

Moderately remarkable, not only for the care taken in creating the music especially for the film (Oliver Weeks' track ‘Needle ballet’ for the sequence in which the junkie Potol injects the drug into Byang's penis veins (0:33:45) is admirable for its lighting and framing), but also for the cinematography, which could not be more careful, especially in terms of contrasts, given that director Ronny Sen has also been a photographer since 2011, participating in collective and individual exhibitions. Now let's talk about the film's plot, which intertwines (as a pretext for the Cat Sticks matchbook or cigarette packet) without concessions, albeit with a rather weak script, the adventures of a group of addicts to ‘sugar brown’ and other substances. At some point, the thread will bring together the nihilist Ronnie and his sidekick when they beat up and rob a young man who was kissing a dancer aspiring to be a film actress in his car, whose biggest star is Shah Rukh Khan. Other drug addicts have fun reminiscing about when they broke into a mosque to cause trouble and, upon being arrested, continued what they believed to be their heroic behaviour by telling the police that they had been sent by ISI and Laloo Prasad, and thus laughing tastelessly about it for a long time. Another addict dresses up as a woman to prostitute himself for 200 rupees to a truck driver, but after receiving fellatio in the trailer, he is thrown out of the vehicle. Elsewhere, the noble Toto approaches David, his cutter or drug supplier, but when his two friends approach, David asks them to leave and Tamanna beats him up, accidentally killing David, which puts Gere and Toto in a tight spot, feverishly imagining how to get rid of the body. After Ronnie tells the driver of the car that the man was cheating on his sister, he beats him up and steals his mobile phone, then falls into a self-destructive pessimism until his father tells him that his best friend Kapil has died and the addicts who stripped naked to inject themselves, one of them in or around his penis, Byang complains to Potol that he would show him the ocean and all he has seen is a river. In general terms, the stories are current, but as I said, the script needed some polishing to tie everything together, which turned out to be rather flawed.