Tathagata Chowdhury, the man breathing theatre perhaps from the moment of his birth, has at last realized his long-cherished dream of making a short film. He has named it Fat Or The Reluctant Butcher. This film has already been selected for screening at the Punk Film Festival in Berlin.
Who is Tathagata Chowdhury?
The history of English theatre in Kolkata would have certainly been written differently without Theatrecian, the 23-year-old English theatre group in Kolkata. Tathagata Chowdhury, a playwright, an actor, a director, a marathon runner and a TED-X speaker founded this group, gave it a solid base and a distinct identity.
His passion for theatre includes writing plays himself, creating plays, training youngsters, organizing shows, and last but never the least, training school children in theatre – practical and theoretical towards the performance of plays – classic, modern, mythological and self-created.
He says, “The intention while founding Theatrecians was to ensure a youth theatre movement in the city that can sustain itself and in the process Theatre in English becomes a viable career option. It is unfortunate that I think I have failed completely. But though I have failed, it has taught me a lot. In the failure of this mission, there have been other unexpected rewards. We did not realise that we had staged around nearly 200 productions with over 2000 shows, not just in Calcutta but across the country and even abroad. It has become a platform for many young talents to express themselves. It is also a stress buster for everyday [professionals.”
The advertising media, as seen in print, online and on television, has been overtly and covertly instilling in both young men and women across the world, the concept of a beautiful body that cancels out everything to do with a high body weight, in other words, obesity. Till a few years back, this was principally a gender issue concentric on girls and women. But today, obesity is one thing that has broken all gender barriers at one go.
Obese men and women are made to feel guilty about their bodies even if the obesity is due to severe, genetic or sometimes incurable medical conditions. Tathagata’s five-minute film instills the psychological impact of this fear in the protagonist.
Fat or The Reluctant Butcher, through its running time of just five minutes, shot in Black-and-White is filled with very dark images of the single character in the film. This character, unnamed, is portrayed by Chowdhury himself who produced, directed and acted in this film. It is a film that scares you, shocks you and also makes you aware of how an obsession to remain trim can impact a person psychologically, emotionally and socially.
In response to what precisely he is trying to express, Tathagata says, “the film examines the psychological degradation of a person obsessed with the idea that he’s perhaps ‘fat.’ *the body as a cityscape* The belly—with its “excess lard”—becomes a congested marketplace or overbuilt quarter of the city, full of surplus and excess, almost spilling over its boundaries.”
The screen introduces you to this strange man who is mortally terrified when he finds that he has put on too much fat on his belly. He is tall, trim and shapely and works out right through the day which makes the viewer question how he puts body and soul together without a professional income to fall back on.
The camera keeps following him in close-up, or, picking at the flab on his tummy, or, trying to find out what went wrong. So, he is a loner, lives alone in a space which is never taken care of and follows him as he moves outdoors in the expanse of the city, under a bridge, or, under a tree while a horse keeps galloping beside him, free of such human trappings of wanting to get rid of the flab.
Explaining his film further, Tathagata adds, “The actor’s ambition mirrors the city’s skyline—he longs to be a tall, visible tower, but feels blocked by the sprawl of his own body. The body’s rhythms—breathing, sweating, eating—echo traffic flows, factory smoke, or neon signs in a restless city, where one is never quite still. The film’s urban landscape of rejection and aspiration finds a double in the body: the city is never finished, always under construction, much like the man’s struggle with his flesh and identity. So, the body here is not just flesh but a lived-in urban terrain, scarred, expanded, and reorganized by desire, anxiety, and cultural standards—an “inner city” mapped onto the actor’s skin.”
This reminded this critic of an 88-minute documentary made in the US in 2019 called Fattitude. Directed by Lindsey Averill, and written by Viridiana Lieberman, Fattitude is a body-positive documentary intent on inspiring change. Fattitude offers alternative ideas that embrace body acceptance at all sizes, explores examples of fat positive representations being produced today by activists and the media, and focuses on real life solutions for moving forward and changing the national conversation about body image.
The camera follows the hero in this film by Tathagata like a veritable stalker as he sits on the commode to relieve himself in the hope that this will take some extra fat off his tummy. He goes outdoors to a field to complete his workout. The image of a horse in motion in the fields perhaps makes him envious of the beauty and grace of the horse’s body that makes no demands about obesity or the lack of it.
The story, if there is one, is narrated only through stark and sharp images collaged as a five-minute trip into the mind and the psyche of this protagonist who seems to be so obsessed with the fat gaining on his tummy that he fails to realise that his craze to have an ideal body has turned him into a non-human worse than the horse which runs free of reins while he, the human, is trapped in his obsession to lose fat till he tries to get rid of the extra fat physically, which is not always possible.
The concept of fat being equated with the ugly and the comic and in general, not high on visual attractiveness or sensual pull has been conditioning both male and female minds to feel guilty if they are fat and proud if they are slim and svelte. This creates a powerful element of discrimination between men (and women) who are fat and men (and women) who are slim.