'''Tabarana Kathe'''


aka Tabara’s Tale
1986 179’ col Kannada
d/sc Girish Kasaravalli pc Apoorva Chitra
dial Poornachandra Tejasvi from his short story
c Madhu Ambat m L. Vaidyanathan
lp Charuhasan, Nalina Murthy, Krishnamurthy,
Jayaram, Master Santosh


Kasaravalli’s multiple-point-of-view melodrama
tells the story of Tabara (Charuhasan), a lowranking
worker in a municipal office who
espouses colonial views despite his obvious
pride in his job in a post-Independence
government. Tabara gets into financial trouble
when his honesty causes enmity among the
coffee planters, and his pension is held up
because he has not remitted some taxes that he
was supposed to have collected. His wife falls
ill and his ‘case’ becomes a mere file number in
a bureaucratic office. The film is narrated from
different points of view: the colonial point of
view, the bureaucratic one, the view of those
who believe Tabara to be mentally deranged
and, mainly, the view of the orphan Babu
through whose eyes the steel and concrete
urban future is presented. Although primarily
told in a realist idiom, at times (e.g. the shots of
Bangalore and in the municipal office) the
camerawork anticipates the surrealism of the
sequel, Mane/Ek Ghar (1989).

[[Film]]