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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