FOUR –Odia Film Coming Of Age

FOUR brings today’s urbanising Odisha to the screen without trivialising its language or tenor. AAO NXT is showcased as Odisha’s first independent OTT platform, and this is the platform’s own production. Partha Ray, the young upcoming actor, had shared the coordinates and I watched the movie in one go without jumping scenes or sequences.

Definitely racy, FOUR brings a different genre to Odia filmmaking and importantly to story play. Of late we have watched in various OTTs, films which are a string of small stories both in Hindi and other regional languages. This is a film which carries four stories, psycho thrillers, edgy, extricating deep human insecurities, desires and fragile psychologies. The four stories titled The Animal, Paradox, Shadow and Stranger are placed in an easy flow but the themes jolt you every time and unannounced.

The viewer could find the alternative reality in contemporary Odia story and characters with stylish screen play, camera work and sleek presentation. The background score is worth mentioning, exclusively. The music has followed the mood, the scenes and the events quite closely. I have always lamented the rural stereotypes of Odia films and the stubbornness of the filmmakers to push them to the audience, without sensitivity to changing times. Is change, bad? Odisha is changing like everything else in the universe and so are our landscapes, our families, our norms and practices. The challenge is to maintain the innate fibre and layering them with changing hues. Are you not changing, am I not changing? Are our families and communities not changing? Then why do we still wallow in the hypocrisy of showing the supposedly ‘rural Odia life’ but laced with tongue-in-cheek, slapstick, misogynistic fervour, comforting with the alibi of ‘audience preference’.

Odia audience is looking for quality films which also mean the ones which they can relate to and build their aspirations on. OTT is now commonly accessible and the young and the senior all have the splendid opportunity to immerse themselves in the limitless diversity of films, documentaries, serials. This is the time when Odia OTT can deliver brilliance in showbiz. For a long time, the talented young film artistes, even with NSD or Mumbai stints, felt slighted and directionless in an Odia film career. But OTT has democratised film creativity and opportunities like never before.

FOUR ushers in a different film genre, filming techniques and modern trends in Odia film. Striking is its economical use of characters – not many people, not unnecessarily loud or jarring. The characters, their relations and events are compact, crisp and believable. They speak normal Odia and stick to conversation style Odia. That’s a breather after being constantly tortured with strange diction of our heroes, heroines, anchors (which sound less like Odia and more like some alien Hindi-English cocktail). Since the short stories are pyscho thrillers, the twists are sharp and the turning points that make the film worth watching. Measured acting and the gloss of the direction and of the special effects are commendable and help the main idea of the film to be duly implemented. In patches a few unwarranted scenes and dialogues could have been better edited or refined. That includes a few avoidable melodramas.

The viewers can expect modish and elegant presentation which they can even share with non-Odia speaking friends without any awkwardness. Time has come to reach out to all and with films like FOUR, Odia is no more a limited precinct of viewership. FOUR, am sure will travel far and wide. Let more such films come with constant and radical improvisations. Like Odia literature needs translations, Odia films need global audience.