There are, presumably, some well-meaning civilians who have entered politics and found the experience nothing but societally beneficial and personally character-improving — but few to none of them are to be found in the movies. That balance doesn’t change with “Master,” a story about the corrupting effects of power on a small-time Bangladeshi politico, and one with relatively few surprises in the telling. Rezwan Shahriar Sumit‘s film is kept interesting, however, both by regional particularities and universal parallels: It’s an eye-opening look at institutional structures in a country that rarely gets much screen time internationally, and a timeworn tale designed to rouse rage against the machine in local and global audiences alike.
To that end, “Master’s” victory over some glossier, bigger-name competition in Rotterdam’s Big Screen competition — a section dedicated to more audience-oriented world cinema — bodes well for its future distribution and streaming prospects, while plentiful further festival bookings are assured. Less intimate and more expansive than Sumit’s gentle, promising 2020 debut “The Salt in Our Waters,” it confirms the writer-director as a filmmaker of robust formal assurance and beyond-borders ambition.
Nasir Uddin Khan gives a performance of sturdy, man-of-the-people authority, gradually slipping into nervy self-doubt, as Jahir, a high school history teacher popular with both his students and the general community in the small rural town of Mohoganj. Introduced giving an impassioned lesson on the corrupting effects of British colonial rule — put a pin in this for later — to a gender-segregated classroom, he’s disrupted by a kerfuffle of reporters eager to see him in action. For it turns out he’s also running for Chairman (a mayoral position of sorts, as explained in opening title cards that lay out the Bangladeshi political hierarchy) of his district, with an unusually liberal campaign stressing women’s rights and improved education facilities.
Jahir’s socialist ideals prove popular in this deprived part of the country, where residents feel both geographically distant and far from the minds of government bigwigs in the capital city of Dhaka. Buoyed by a relatable family-man image, with the support of his patient wife Jharna (Zakia Bari Mamo) and their young son, he secures an easy victory — ending his teaching career, though he hopes to bring his nurturing values as an educator to local government. It isn’t long before he realizes his naïveté.
If Jahir is unprepared for the heat his new position immediately brings him from local criminals and charlatans threatened by his clean approach, he also has little idea what sharks await him inside the political sphere. Chief among the latter is his region’s unnamed UNO (Upazila Nirbahi Officer), a wily mid-level bureaucrat who presents herself as Jahir’s direct line to the big guns, and persistently pulls rank on him with a disarming megawatt smile.
Superbly played by Azmeri Haque Badhon (the compelling star of Bangladeshi Cannes entry “Rehana” a few years back) she’s the film’s most magnetic and richly drawn character — not a full-scale villain, but a woman who’s learned the moral compromises required to gain authority in a patriarchal society. Meanwhile, as Jahir’s marriage and home life crumble under the pressures of his new job, “Master” stands out for its examination of a male politician primarily through his relationships with women, which mostly undercut the feminist pledges of his early campaigning.
Such nuances give “Master” texture and tension in the first half, though the script — by the director with Sabbir Hossain Shovon — gets less subtle as it goes, and as Jahir’s disillusionment and corruption is hastened, though the bright pastels of Tuhin Tamijul’s lensing do little to betray his darkening soul. When the UNO presses for his allyship in proposing the building of a luxury hotel on the town’s forested fringes, necessitating the razing of a current shanty settlement for the homeless, his principles finally run aground. “You’re a history teacher, but you’ve learned so little from the past,” scolds Jharna — an irony the film could probably afford to leave unspoken.