Publicity
poster for Chander Pahar (©
Kamaleshwar Mukherjee/Shree Venkatesh Films – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
One of the most famous Bengali adventure
novels is Chander Pahar (retitled as Mountain of the Moon in subsequent
English-language translations), which was written by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, an Indian writer in the Bengali language,
and was originally published in 1937. Just under a decade ago, it was turned
into a blockbuster Bengali movie that I have long wanted to watch, due to its
notable cryptozoological content, as will be revealed below, but trying to
track down its English-subtitled 2-disc DVD proved all but impossible.
True, one
example had been listed on ebay for quite a while, but its seller was based in
the USA, and when the very considerable cost of shipping it to the UK quoted by
the seller, plus import charges, were added to the far from inconsiderable Buy
It Now purchase price of the DVD itself, the total cost far exceeded what I was
willing to pay for it. And so my wait continued, until very recently, when
local friend and Amazon Prime subscriber Jane Cooper very kindly enabled me to
watch it at long last by purchasing it for a significantly lower cost on AP. So
here now is my review of this spectacular monster/adventure movie. (Incidentally, I'd still very
much like to purchase it in the form of its 2-disc English-subtitled DVD, to
add to my movie collection and thereby always have it directly available to
rewatch, so if you see one anywhere for sale at a reasonable price, please do
let me know – thanks very much!)
Directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee, released
in 2013 by Shree Venkatesh Films, and set in the years 1909-1910, Chander Pahar follows the exciting
(albeit sometimes positively Munchausenesque!) adventures of a 20-year-old
Bengali man named Shankar Ray Choudhuri. He has long dreamed of being a derring-do
explorer in Africa, but seems destined to spend his life much more mundanely,
working as an administrator at the local jute mill in his small Bengali town
instead. Happily, however, fate steps in, in the shape of a relative who
secures for Shankar a job in Kenya, as the station-master of a tiny railway
terminus miles from anywhere.
Shankar accepts the position with
alacrity, seeing it as a stepping stone to his becoming a daring Dark Continent
explorer. However, his long-treasured romantic daydreams of Africa are soon
shattered by the reality of living in such a remote spot there, when he
encounters a ferocious man-eating lion, which he amazingly manages to out-run
(and eventually shoot dead) even though he has injured his leg, and a deadly
black mamba that sneaks into his railway cabin one evening and bites him, but
which he miraculously survives with no more than a bandaged hand (in the
original novel, conversely, he is not bitten at all).
Bibhutibhushan
Bandyopadhyay, author of the original novel Chander
Pahar upon which this movie is based (public domain)
One day, while exploring his isolated
little kingdom beyond the railway terminus, Shankar spies a middle-aged man,
seemingly close to death, lying high up in a tree while a pack of hungry
hyaenas repeatedly leap up towards him, hoping to haul him down and devour him.
Armed with his trusty hunting rifle, however, Shankar soon scares them away,
and then rescues the man, carrying him back to his cabin.
The man informs Shankar that he is a
Portuguese explorer and gold-seeker named Diego Alvarez, who is able to speak
Bengali and English (a consequence of this being that from then on, the
dialogue spoken between them in the movie switches constantly – and sometimes
very confusingly – from one language to another), and during his recuperation,
tended to by Shankar, Alvarez thrills him with dramatic stories of his real-life
African adventures.
In particular, some years earlier Alvarez
and a fellow explorer, Jim Carter, had journeyed to an inhospitable and
virtually inaccessible arid land of high hills and even higher mountains known
as the Richtersveld, situated in the northwestern corner of what is today South
Africa's Northern Cape province. They were seeking a legendary diamond mine
supposedly hidden inside a cave deep within a mysterious Richtersveld mountain
known as Chander Pahar – the Mountain of the Moon.
According to local legend, however, this
diamond mine is guarded by the cave's monstrous inhabitant – a gigantic beast still-undescribed
by science, but which for reasons never explained either in this movie or in Bandyopadhyay's original novel is
known here as the bunyip (despite the latter name being in reality an
aboriginal name specifically applied to Australia's most famous indigenous
mystery beast!). Moreover, not long after reaching Chander Pahar the two men
swiftly and all too tragically discover that the bunyip is no legend, when it confronts
Carter and slaughters him. Alvarez flees back to civilization, but vows to
return one day, to avenge Carter and once again seek Chander Pahar's hidden
cache of diamonds.
Full
cover of the English-subtitled DVD version of Chander Pahar (© Kamaleshwar Mukherjee/Shree Venkatesh Films –
reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review
purposes only)
Listening to Alvarez's bold exploits is
more than sufficient to inspire Shankar to quit his station-master job and set
out with Alvarez on his long-planned return to Chander Pahar. During their
arduous journey there, they narrowly survive the explosive eruption of a
volcano that hasn't even been documented by the Western world, but before they
have chance to seek out the diamond cave's gemstones, they are confronted by
its horrific guardian – the bunyip. Shankar freezes in terror, so Alvarez races
to his rescue, only for the bunyip to turn its attention to him instead,
attacking and mortally wounding him with its pair of immense walrus-like fangs,
before departing into the night, leaving behind a weeping, devastated Shankar,
who cradles the dying Alvarez in his arms until he passes away a few moments
later.
After burying Alvarez, Shankar is now
entirely alone and sees no option but to return to civilization. However, he loses
his way, and accidentally encounters the diamond cave, but without suspecting
that this is what it is. After entering the cave, Shankar becomes lost again,
but by collecting some pebbles that he finds inside it and using them to mark
his trail to prevent himself from walking aimlessly in circles, he finally
discovers an exit and escapes, taking with him a few pebbles as souvenirs of
his time spent there.
In his attempts to find a route back
home, Shankar stumbles upon another cave, and when he enters it he discovers
the skeleton of the Italian explorer Attilio Gatti, who had been betrayed and
abandoned by his own diamond-seeking party some time earlier. Gatti had managed
to hide some uncut diamonds from them, however, and left a note stating where
they are and that whoever finds his remains can take the diamonds for
themselves if they will give him a Christian burial.
This Shankar does, but is astonished to find
that Gatti's uncut diamonds look just like the supposed pebbles that he,
Shankar, had found in the previous cave and had used for marking his trail
there. At last he realizes that he had
discovered the diamond cave after all, albeit unknowingly, and those 'pebbles'
from it that he'd retained as souvenirs were priceless uncut diamonds!
Photo-stills
of the ferocious bunyip (© Kamaleshwar Mukherjee/Shree Venkatesh Films –
reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for
educational/review purposes only)
Trekking through the jungle again after
burying Gatti, Shankar rediscovers the cave, and his fury over Alvarez's
slaughter by the bunyip resurfaces,
spurring him on in seeking to destroy this monstrous creature once and for all.
So he devises and builds a concealed, deadly trap, then purposefully lures the
bunyip towards it, using himself as bait. The trap functions perfectly, impaling
the murderous creature on a series of long wooden spikes, thereby incapacitating
it and enabling Shankar to shoot his fearsome foe dead with his rifle while
safely suspended in a tree far above it and out of its reach.
Following an ill-advised decision to seek
home not by continuing to trek over the jungle hills but instead by venturing
into the Kalahari Desert, however, Shankar realizes all too quickly that one
sand dune looks very like another, especially when his skills at reading a
compass prove less than adept. Finally, dying of fatigue and dehydration, and
terrorized by hyaenas, he decides to end his life with what in his
thirst-induced delirium he believes to be his very last bullet – but just as he
is about to do so, he spots a road far below him, with some vehicles travelling
slowly along it. Summoning one final spurt of energy, Shankar staggers down the
hill, shouting and waving his arms – and they see him! The vehicles are being
driven by a survey team, who promptly rescue him and take him to a hospital in
what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), where he recuperates
and amazes everyone with his tales of his exploits, just as Alvarez had
previously amazed him with his own.
The movie ends with Shankar, now fully
restored to good health and having become a very rich man after selling most of
his diamonds (and sending the others to his family back home in Bengal), as
well as his story to a newspaper. So what are his plans now for the future?
This is Shankar we are talking about, so there can only be one answer to that
question – he charts a vessel to take him by river upon further adventures as
he journeys back to Chander Pahar, the Mountain of the Moon.
By the way, I should point out that
whereas all of the other major characters in this movie (and novel) are
fictitious, there really was an Italian explorer of Africa named Attilio Gatti,
who journeyed to the real Mountains of the Moon (the nickname of the Ruwenzori Mountains
on the border of Uganda with the Democratic Republic of the Congo) but
thankfully he did not die abandoned in a remote cave. Instead, after a highly
successful career not only as an explorer but also as a popular author and
pioneering wildlife film-maker, he ended his days peacefully in Vermont, USA,
aged 72, on 1 July 1969.
The
real Attilio Gatti, featured with his wife Ellen in a 1939 advertisement
(public domain)
At the time of its production, Chander Pahar had the highest budget in
the history of Bengali cinema (roughly equivalent to US$ 2 million), and it shows.
Filmed on location in several different but all extremely photogenic sites in
South Africa (including the Drakensberg Mountains, the Kruger National Park,
and the Kalahari Desert), as well as in Kenya, Uganda, and West Bengal in India,
it is brimming throughout with spectacular scenes of wildlife, and stars Indian
acting/producing/singing megastar Dev as Shankar, alongside celebrated South
African actor-poet Gérard Rudolf as Diego Alvarez, and South African rock star
Martin Cito Otto as Jim Carter.
Nevertheless, this historic movie has not
been without its critics. Some have opined that Dev's portrayal of Shankar was
unconvincing, which only makes me wonder if they watched the same movie as I
did. Dev plays Shankar as an excitable, dream-driven, achingly-naïve young man,
barely adult but ebulliently energetic and totally indefatigable, who is
finally realizing his life-long ambition to explore Africa – all of which is
exactly what Shankar is, and how he was verbally portrayed by Bandyopadhyay in his novel. Rudolf
received better reviews as Alvarez, providing an older, far more experienced
traveller's wisdom and practical restraint to Shankar's periodic bouts of
over-enthusiasm and under-thinking.
Another aspect of the movie that has
attracted criticism is the bunyip – which is why I have held off from
describing this monster until now, as I felt that it needed its own separate
discussion here. In Bandyopadhyay's
novel, the bunyip is never directly seen – a shadow of it moving outside the
tent of Shankar and Alvarez one evening is as much as is offered to the
readers, leaving the rest to their imagination. In contrast, this movie
presents the viewers with a truly memorable CGI bunyip in all its hideous
glory, and gory activity, but which some reviewers have denigrated for
destroying the monster's mystique, and others for what they considered to be
its inferior quality (similar criticisms regarding their quality, or lack of
it, have also been aimed at the CGI-engendered volcanic eruption scenes).
As revealed earlier in this review via a
series of photo-stills, the bunyip is undeniably a startling creation – unlike
any beast known to science, that's for sure. A waddling, feline-faced abomination with
a swollen, toad-like body and an exceedingly long, whip-like tail, plus a huge and revoltingly-vascular, pendant throat-sac, livid crimson in colour and
hanging down so far that the creature seems in permanent danger of tripping over
it when galumphing after one of its potential human victims. Most noticeable of all, however, is its pair of truly
enormous vertical fangs that any prehistoric sabre-toothed cat would have given
its high teeth for (so to speak!). (Moreover, a Kindle e-book edition of Bandyopadhyay's novel actually depicts
the bunyip on the front cover as a bona fide living sabre-tooth.)
A Kindle
edition of Bandyopadhyay's novel
Chander Pahar in which the bunyip is
depicted as a living sabre-tooth (© Kindle – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
Interestingly, however, this terrifying
apparition does recall a traditional African mystery beast known as the
dingonek (click here for my account of it and
comparable cryptids in my ShukerNature cryptozoology blog), and which is actually mentioned
in Bandyopadhyay's novel in
addition to the bunyip. In contrast, as noted earlier, I have yet to discover why
Bandyopadhyay applied the name of an
exclusively Australian water monster to his terrestrial African mystery beast.
According to traditional African lore, conversely, the dingonek is amphibious
in nature, i.e. both an adept swimmer in rivers and a formidable adversary on
land – so why didn't Bandyopadhyay simply call his monster the dingonek instead
of distinguishing it from the latter?
Another criticism that I've seen when
reading reviews of Chander Pahar is
that the movie's lengthy opening scene is entirely superfluous, serving no
purpose whatsoever. This scene depicts Shankar as already an explorer in Africa,
and being chased by an adult bull elephant, but leading the creature towards a
trap that he had earlier (off-screen) created – only for Shankar himself to
become accidentally entwined in a trip-wire noose that hauls him up through the
air, leaving him dangling so high above the ground that even his proboscidean
pursuer and other approaching elephants cannot reach him with their trunks. He
then wakes up – it had all been just a dream, albeit a nightmarish one, and he
is in his bed at home in Bengal. Far from being superfluous, however, this scene
serves a vital role – for not only does it offer the movie's viewers an
immediate example of how obsessed Shankar is with becoming an African explorer
but also, crucially, it is this dream that inspires Shankar's subsequent
creation in real life of the deadly trap that snares the bunyip. Indeed,
Shankar even works into that climactic encounter – but this time as a
deliberate escape ploy – the trip-wire noose that hauls him up through the air,
out of reach of the bunyip while he shoots it dead.
Overall, and certainly not for the first
time with movies, I disagree diametrically with those who have criticized Chander Pahar – imho, it is a thrilling,
visual delight that kept me enthralled throughout its not inconsiderable
148-minute running time. In addition, it constitutes a very bold, decisive
surge forward in the history of Bengali cinema, which until then had scarcely
ventured into the field of adventure movies typified by such Hollywood
blockbusters as the Indiana Jones feature films, for instance. Consequently,
those viewers who agree with me will be pleased to know that Shankar clearly
survives his journey back to the Mountain of the Moon, because in 2017 his exploits
continue in a second movie, Amazon
Obhijaan. This time he is seeking ancient treasure in South America, but
once again confronting all manner of dangers along the way, including a
predatory giant anaconda. At present, this latter movie is the highest-grossing
Bengali film of all time (grossing US$ 7.47 million worldwide), with Chander Pahar in second place (grossing
US$ 3.41 million worldwide). So, critics notwithstanding, Shankar and his movies'
makers are clearly doing something right!
If you'd like to experience for yourself
a glimpse of the thrills and spills that Shankar experiences during his search
for the Mountain of the Moon and its hidden diamonds, be sure to click here
to watch an official Chander Pahar
trailer on YouTube showcasing its very stirring title song. (You can also watch
the entire movie free here on YT, but only in the form of an
Odia-language version with no English subtitles, sadly.) And don't forget to
click here
if you'd like to view an excerpt from Shankar's daunting to-the-death encounter
with the belligerent bunyip!
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my
Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a
complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Publicity
poster for the American cinema release of Chander
Pahar (© Kamaleshwar Mukherjee/Shree Venkatesh Films – reproduced here on a
strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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