The Last Thakur DVD

An armed stranger arrives in town and flip-flops between two local factions.

It is a plot type that defines the oater genre’s outer (non-American) margins, traceable from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) through Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) to just about every ’spaghetti western’ made since, and on down to Takashi Miike’s ‘noodle eastern’ Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). The bare bones of this scenario can also be discerned in  The Last Thakur, set in a rural backwater of contemporary Bangladesh, but first-time writer/director Sadik Ahmed is less interested in cowboy movie pastiche than in an intense drama of misunderstandings, madness and murder.

Thakur (Tariq Anam Khan) is a crippled landlord who has been ruthlessly reclaiming land from his debtors to build a Hindu temple – and has isolated himself from the local, largely Muslim community in the process. He is the last in his line, and his days are numbered. Chairman (Ahmed Rubel) is the recently re-elected local leader who likes everyone to call him ‘father’ – except the actual sons that his philandering has left scattered about town. He is plotting to kill Thakur, spurred on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife, and by guilt over his own  secrets. Then a guard (Tanveer Hassan) enters town, a self-proclaimed atheist with nothing to his name but a rifle and a frayed birth certificate. In a heated atmosphere, he sells his services to the highest bidder, while pursuing his own quest for knowledge and vengeance.

These three characters, not so much men-with-no-names as men-who-conceal-their-names, have their fates bound together by the sins of a long-hidden past – and adding to the sense of existential tragedy is a young narrator (Tanju Miah) whose highly partisan exposition proves far less reliable than the occasional insights offered by the blind Mustafa (Jayanto Chattapadhyay). Here, appearances deceive, and characters are doomed to continue, rather than learn from, the mistakes of their fathers. This bleak message is offset by wonderful widescreen cinematography and a soundtrack that perfectly blends influences both eastern and western.

Anton Bitel