India has a culture with a long history of thousands of years, not only magnificent, colorful and complex, mysterious, but Also Indian cinema is its best carrier, through different themes and styles, freely showing its heavy precipitation.
For me, every Indian film is a novel exotic cultural journey, giving me a variety of unprecedented experiences, such as the epic shock of "Baahubali King", the imaginative action design in "Rebel for Love 2", the brain-opening novelty of "Daddy 102", the strange logic under the ancient cultural heritage of "Toilet Hero", even if the anti-Chinese god film such as "World War III" can provide mirror references such as things that have never been seen in other films.
But when it comes to the mystery of Indian culture, it was only after watching the fantasy thriller "Tabad" recently that I first felt it.
(Followed by a long and serious spoiler)
The story takes place in 1918, during the British colonial period, in a small village called Tabad.
There is a legend that has been passed down in India.
In the universe, there is a goddess called the goddess of prosperity, which is a symbol of infinite gold and food, and the earth is her womb. When the universe was created, she also gave birth to 160 million gods, but her first child, Hasta, was her favorite.
However, the greedy Hasta was not satisfied with this pampering, and he wanted to take all the gold and food of the goddess.
After he managed to obtain the gold and tried to obtain food, all the other gods were enraged, and they attacked Hasta in groups, turning him into pieces. Nearly destroyed, the goddess rescued Hasta, and he was forever forgotten, not worshipped, and slept in his mother's womb.
However, the people of the small village of Tabad learned of Hasta from nowhere and built a temple for it.
Since then, Tabad has been in the midst of continuous rain all year round.
The protagonist, Wiener's mother, a widow who lives alone with him and his brother in Tabad, is the mistress of a local aristocratic old man for 12 years (the two children are the illegitimate children of the old man) and takes care of his long-term confined great-grandmother, in order to extract the secret of Hasta's treasure from him, because he is said to be an insider.
But the aristocratic old man always just repeated the sentence "Gold coins are for you to earn yourself", he squandered all his ancestral property, and he could not find the treasure, and he used this as bait for carnal desire, so that Wiener's mother continued to provide sexual services, and finally died.
Wiener's mother and son inherited the manor of the aristocratic old man, but remained poor.
Wiener suggested that it would be better to ask her great-grandmother about the whereabouts of the treasure, but her mother refused, and she, who had been responsible for taking care of the old lady for many years, thought that her great-grandmother was a very dangerous person.
In an accident, Wiener's brother fell from a tree and injured his head, and his mother rushed to take him out for medical treatment.
The money-hungry Wiener tried to get close to his great-grandmother, but when he opened the door, he saw an old monster with a terrible face, whose mouth was fixed by long nails, and she frantically pounced on Wiener, showing great hunger, and even planned to eat Wiener.
In a hurry, Wiener remembered a mantra that his mother usually said when she took care of her great-grandmother: Go to sleep, or Hasta will come to you! The great-grandmother was momentarily frightened and fell asleep, and Wiener escaped the disaster.
The mother returned home with her badly injured brother, and she felt that it was her lust for the treasure that made her younger son cursed and decided to leave Tabad.
On the way away, Wiener remembers the legendary treasure and once again proposes to go back to find it, and his mother scolds him for being greedy, and takes a gold coin from her arms and angrily throws it on Wiener.
This gold coin was the one held on the statue of The Hasta in the temple, and Wiener looked at it with a fascinated look.
Fifteen years later, the money-hungry Wiener returned to Tabad again. (Estimated mother has passed away)
As he had expected, the great-grandmother was still alive, and in the closed hut, the flesh was dry and almost dead, the bare heart was still beating strongly, and she begged Wiener to burn herself to death. In exchange, she told Wiener the secret of the treasure.
After taking care of his great-grandmother's affairs, Wiener returned home with gold coins as he wished.
Since then, he has returned to Tabad from time to time, always bringing back some gold coins at a time, sometimes only two, sometimes as many as a dozen, and the increasingly wealthy Wiener has lived a luxurious life and raised a mistress, for which the family is often restless.
And his unknown gold coins, which also aroused the covetousness of the traders with whom he traded, also quietly came to Tabad, and The already aware Wiener pretended not to know, as usual, to the location of the treasure, a large well, took the gold coins from below, and then left.
The merchant immediately went down to the well and found a huge stone treasure chest, and when he opened the box, he found that there was no treasure inside, but a hole.
He slowly climbed down the rope hanging from the entrance to a strange cave.
The whole cave seemed to be alive, constantly breathing and squirming, and the whole wall was fleshy, covered with blood vessels, and a red glow.
The vendor found a lunch box on the ground, and when it was opened, it contained a humanoid dough.
Just when he was at a loss for words, a terrible low roar came from around him, and a monster swooped at him like lightning, tearing and biting.
Subsequently, Wiener came to the cave again and staged a gold coin battle.
He made a circle out of the hole with flour,
And took out a dough, and soon a skinny monster wearing a crown and jewelry, but without skin, appeared, and looked straight at the dough in Wiener's hand,
But he couldn't get close, because the flour circle isolated him.
Wiener threw the dough out of the circle, the monster quickly rushed over, swallowed up, Wiener stepped out of the dough circle, pulled the monster's pocket, and the yellow gold coin was instantly scattered on the ground.
Wiener skillfully picked up a few pieces as quickly as he could, and the monster was about to eat Wiener after eating the dough, and Wiener deftly climbed the rope, and before being chased, climbed away from the cave entrance and closed the stone treasure chest.
At this point, the secret of Hasta's treasure has finally been solved.
That hole is the womb of the goddess of prosperity, and the monster is Hasta, because he did not get food, so he is very hungry for food, so the dough can lure him out, and he wants to eat people after eating the dough, but at the same time he is afraid of food, so the flour circle can isolate him.
Anyone who has been bitten by Hasta is cursed as an eternal but ever-hungry freak.
Apparently, great-grandmother had been bitten by Hasta, and after her accident, the people of the clan realized the danger of the treasure, nailed her mouth with a long nail, hid the secret of the treasure, and left the ancestral motto "Gold coins are for you to earn yourself" to warn future generations not to be greedy, but obviously this is useless.
The aristocratic old man had been tirelessly searching for treasure, and a large number of years older were still addicted to carnal desires, showing the greedy blood flowing through his body.
As his illegitimate son, Wiener undoubtedly inherited his greedy nature and appeared to be more aggressive, taking such a huge risk in order to obtain gold coins, and taking chestnuts again and again.
As he grew older, Wiener began to lose strength, and although he had already saved enough gold coins to spend a lifetime, he was still not satisfied, so he began to train his son to succeed him.
After a series of failed gold coins, Wiener took the risk and embarked on the road to Tabad with his 15-year-old son.
Originally, I wanted to practice my hands first, but my son brought the dough down, which attracted Hasta, and the father and son panicked, fortunately, there was no danger, and the son also picked up several gold coins. When he returned home, he also flirted with Wiener's mistress.
Wiener was shocked that his son was more greedy than he was.
But he was too late to reflect, because India's independent government had been formed, Tabad was about to be taken back, the financial road was about to be cut off, and Wiener was impatient.
At this time, the son made a bold suggestion, it is better to take a few more dough down, to buy enough time, simply steal Hasta's pocket, you can once and for all. Wiener, anxious to keep the source of his wealth, accepted the offer.
Father and son brought a dozen doughs and vowed to get Hasta's pocket.
However, after coming to the cave, I found that the situation was completely unexpected... The film also ushered in its most thrilling moment!
The biggest thing about this film is that it successfully creates a strong atmosphere of weirdness and mystery.
First of all, this is thanks to its characteristic text. The whole story is from the director to listen to a legend told by a friend, and then in the script creation, integrated into the local horror story, to create a plot full of Indian religious culture mystery, whether it is the goddess's womb, Hasta's pocket and the entire gold coin mechanism and punishment, are unique, mysterious, people can't help but feel a sense of awe behind the long-standing religious civilization behind it.
The second is the film's unique image style. Tabad is always a gray patch, damp, muddy, depressing, unsettling,
In the womb of the goddess of prosperity, the dazzling scarlet fills the whole picture, and the terrible hasta and the yellow gold coins are dotted in it, which makes people have a complex emotion of desire and horror, so that the whole film is shrouded in a strange atmosphere.
In addition, the film's puzzle-style narrative method (you can feel it from my spoilers) makes the secret of Hasta's treasure progress like peeling an onion, but never reveals the whole picture until the end of the play, which not only makes the story full of suspense, but also aggravates the mystery and weirdness of the whole film.
At the same time, the film abandons the usual song and dance interludes, exaggerated interpretations, and noisy lengths of Indian films, and becomes cold, low, and concise, forming a unified style that complements the whole story.
Director Rahi was determined to make "Tabad" a "never before in India" film, so he repeatedly revised it for six years. The final result is also gratifying, such an Indian film, at least I have seen it for the first time, and it is really great.
When it was screened at the Venice Film Festival, many viewers used the term "shocked" to describe how they felt about the film. The Times of India described it as "gloomy and mysterious" and even described it as reminiscent of the classic Hollywood films Pan's Labyrinth and RubberHead.
In contrast, the theme of the film is more general, basically a fable story, admonishing people not to be greedy, otherwise they will pay a painful price, but greedy people always feel that they can grasp the right balance, that is, to satisfy greed and be saved, and finally slide down the abyss.
It's basically a cliché.
In the film, Tabad symbolizes desire, and the continuous rain symbolizes the never-ending desire, that is, greed, and this greed is projected onto each of the main characters in the play, and presented to different degrees, and finally they are punished to varying degrees.
The film was released in India in October 2018 and has a very good reputation, with IMDb scoring a high score of 8.4 and earning Rs 135 crore, which is definitely a commercial success compared to its production fee of only 50 million rupees.
At present, it has been reported that "Tabad" will shoot a sequel.