Director Sudipto Roy surpasses expectations once again with the release of his latest film that ventures into the world of dystopian realism. Roy’s #Cafe2022, starring Madhurima Ghosh as Tara—the only character we see on the screen—reminds of classics like 12 Angry Men, My Dinner With Andre, and Telephone Booth, wherein very few standalone characters weave an intricate plotline throughout the runtime. However, what distinguishes Roy’s film from others is the cross-genre fabric set in the near-pandemic-struck future.
Tara, the protagonist, wakes up baffled in a confined room and finds that there is no way to leave. She merely remembers how she has got there. The locked room is dimly lit with neon glow and the only sound Tara hears, besides a few male voices, are the ambient noises of a Café-cum-Bar called #Cafe2022. All the auditory cues reach Tara through a small speaker in the room. The intermittent caveats from the speaker telling the actress to maintain sanitisation protocols and follow social distancing add to her weariness.
The setting seems like a Panopticon—a structure wherein the concept of the design is to allow all prisoners to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. However, it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the prison cells at once. Concurrently, the inmates cannot know when they are being watched or by how many guards, if at all, such that they become motivated to behave as though they are being watched at all times.
Tara is much like the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, under the constant scrutiny of the Big Brother. The fact, whether the solitary confinement of Tara is voluntary or forced remains a mystery throughout the film, even after the credits roll. She is probably a Covid-19 asymptomatic carrier and is under precautionary or forced quarantine. However, the voices she hears through the speaker keep room for the speculations of viewers wide open.
Tara’s situation could be like Evey Hammond’s in V for Vendetta. As the plot of the film unravels, Evey finds that her imprisonment was actually staged by the protagonist V himself. Tara is almost convinced by the voices from the speaker that she is on a date. However, her nervous breakdown piques her to find a way to escape from the room. To her surprise, she finds out that all the ways to exit are restricted, noticing that even the walls are electrified in the moment when she touches anything in the room and flinches with a shock.
Though Madhurima Ghosh has religiously been pursuing theatre and has appeared in numerous web series and films, the portrayal of Tara was a novel endeavour for her. “Usually, we read the script and immerse ourselves into a specific character. However, this time it was different. The pandemic and the quarantine was a reality. Things were difficult,” said Ghosh. Her versatile performance is one of the prominent reasons that the 25-minute-long film does not seem like a monotonous drag.
“She worked very hard for the film. It was a new character for all of us,” said Roy.
Written and directed by Sudipto Roy, #Cafe2022 is actually an extracted dream sequence from a bigger story that is based in 2025, revolving around the life of a young filmmaker Tara. The coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent lockdown was one of the reasons that #Cafe2022 came out earlier than planned. “The full feature film was initially set in 2025, keeping in mind the political and environmental scenario of the country and the entire world,” says Roy.
“Then the pandemic happened and all of us were stuck at home,” Roy added.
#Cafe2022 was shot in just 10 days with the entire team— consisting of the five-member crew and actress Madhurima Ghosh—in quarantine together. The film was viewed at Marche Du Film in Cannes in June and would be aired on Television in Germany tentatively by September.