November 17, 2023

Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023)

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The two defining currents of Tamil cinema of the past decade — the engaged, politically aware films of the Pa. Ranjith school and the playful, movie-aware work of the Naalaya Iyakkunar gang — collide head on in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023), a spiritual sequel to the director’s second feature Jigarthanda (2014). Where the earlier film, arguably its maker’s finest, was a heady celebration of the supremacy of cinematic mythmaking over that of the gun barrel, DoubleX is a much more solemn, spiritually tortured assertion of the importance of cinematic demystification.

As a filmmaker, Karthik Subbaraj calls to mind those expert craftsmen who keep snipping away at a chunk of folded paper without giving us an idea of where they are going with it, only to unfold it at the end and have us marvel the intricacy of the design and the necessity of every redundant seeming gesture. He begins with pet ideas and images — in this case, again, the primacy of the camera over the gun — and then weaves a convoluted plot over them outwards, allowing the audience to arrive at their beating heart in the middle of a film. Showy? Absolutely. And DoubleX doubles down on the showiness. Every shot is an event – sometimes tiringly so, as in the many ritual shootouts organized in a movie theatre — and dramatic logic makes way for a logic of the spectacle.

Coerced by a cop to kill a ruthless, Clint Eastwood-loving henchman named Caesar (Raghava Lawrence, spitting image of a young Rajinikanth), prisoner Raydas (SJ Suryah) masquerades as a filmmaker to woo his vain target into a celluloid dream and slay him. Raydas and Caesar embark on a movie project together, but they soon find their fiction overwhelmed by reality. Faced with the genocide of a mountainous tribe by those in power, both filmmaker and subject must choose to leave fiction for reality. Rather, transform their fiction into reality.

As the synopsis suggests, the film goes all over the place, and then some, and part of the fun and the frustration is in observing Karthik Subbaraj make straight-faced connections between elements that have no right to be together. His previous film Mahaan (2022) — built around the idea of real-life father and son playing a slippery morality game on screen — was in comparison a lean operation, balancing its two central elements with relative ease. DoubleX, in contrast, is unwieldy — weighed down by seriousness where Jigarthanda was shrewdly unserious and light-footed — overstuffed with dramatic developments, all of which, to be sure, is fleshed out with the director’s characteristic taste for symmetries, repetitions and reversals. A wannabe cop, Raydas ends up as a criminal, pretends to be a filmmaker, only to become a real filmmaker exposing the cops; a petty criminal, Caesar aspires to be a movie star, only to turn into a real hero, who becomes a screen legend. And so on.

After Mahaan, Karthik Subbaraj seems to have grown more comfortable propelling his narrative through characters that aren’t conventionally likeable. For a good while, DoubleX is a veritable parade of inglorious bastards, our identification never resting securely with any of them. But despite Karthik Subbaraj’s self-absorbed cinephilia, there’s a naïve idealism at the heart of his films that keeps them from hip cynicism. Part of the idealism comes from the subaltern political assertion, now domesticated thanks to the work of Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj, that DoubleX borrows and gives a unique spin to: cinema cannot defeat oppression, but it can stand witness to it; art cannot fight malevolent power, but it can influence individuals to change the nature of that power.

DoubleX is Karthik Subbaraj’s first film to release in theatres in many years (Mahaan went straight to streaming), so it is perhaps understandable that he turns it into a sentimental ode to the collective movie experience. The notion that a theatre audience can be outraged by images of oppression and moved to action (a lasting legacy of Shankar’s cinema, where cable news and social media become the keepers of public conscience) is so corny and old-fashioned that it is thoroughly impressive in its sincerity. DoubleX presents it almost as a necessary myth for truth to flourish.

It is curious that we get Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and DoubleX within the span of a month. Very different pictures, but both tackle fraught political subjects with an often stifling piety (although Karthik Subbaraj is capable of inserting an absolutely juvenile punchline in a cop’s mouth in the film’s most harrowing scene), expose cinema’s tendency to “print the legend,” yet refuse to stop at this demystification in order to lay the foundations for truth. The worst rogues in DoubleX use cinema as a medium for political propaganda, but it is also put at the service of justice. The camera is neutral, it is those who wield it that make it good or evil. That, perhaps, is the ultimate myth.

 

March 9, 2023

Thuramukham (2023)

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What struck me first watching Thuramukham, a large-scale period picture about docker struggle in coastal Kerala, is how abstract and timeless it feels. Rajeev Ravi’s fourth feature is certainly set in a specific location and era—the area of Mattanchery in Cochin during the forties and the fifties—but it isn’t until a good while that these particulars come to the fore. Where Rajeev’s previous films establish time and place in their opening minutes, Thuramukham immerses us into a fable-like world that feels untouched by history. When the camera descends into an anonymous settlement of huts in the first shot — one of the film’s many convergences with Bala’s Paradesi (2013) — it’s not even clear if it’s a real space.

Living in this netherworld—a cinematographer’s paradise, with its candlelit rooms and nocturnal action—are dockhands who fight every day for chapas, work permits tossed at them by exploiting contractors, and spend what remains of their wages on alcohol and gambling. Part of Thuramukham traces the evolution of this lumpen mass into a proletariat fighting for its rights, developed through the characters of brothers Moidu (Nivin Pauly) and Hamza (Arjun Ashokan). This vast, generation-spanning narrative arc gives the film an epic sweep comparable to that of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), on which Rajeev was cinematographer.

The sprawl of the film has another possible source. Rajeev Ravi is a filmmaker with a weakness for classic literature. He gravitates towards stories of individuals swept along by the forces of time. His characters are often passive witnesses of history who, by choice or circumstance, become its protagonists. Thuramukham, written by Gopan Chithambaran and dipping in and out of Russian literature, fissures the leading character of Kammattipaadam (2016) into the figures of Moidu and Hamza, men whose nihilism or passivity renders them victims of history, only to fuse them again in their choice to act.

The monumentality of Thuramukham is only part of the story. What really nuances this testosterone-driven saga, and why I find the film to be a significant departure from Rajeev’s earlier work, is the way it relentlessly balances the epic with the intimate. The world of Thuramukham is very distinctly divided into domestic and public spheres, which respectively translate to feminine and masculine domains of action. Politics is the means by which men look out for one another, while women find solace in each other through shared suffering and mutual care.

The lack of feminine agency in Rajeev’s films has been noted, and I can’t help but feel that Thuramukham is working out an answer to that reproach. At first glance, the film only adds fuel to the fire. Confined to their homes, the women nurture, love and suffer in silence as men get out there to take control of their fates. But, for once, we also see the havoc the men wreak by their actions or inaction. The film reserves its most evocative closeups for its leading women, the terrific Poornima Indrajith and Nimisha Sajayan, whose faces bear the brunt of men’s follies.

So the film responds to the exclusion of women from public sphere by revalorizing the domestic sphere. For one, its political story is couched within an intricate filial narrative in which the class consciousness of the prodigal son coincides with his coming home while that of his brother coincides with his leaving home for the streets. It is also substantial that, unlike its predecessors, Thuramukham ends on the closeup of a woman, one who has been forced to leave her household and mourn in public.

[Originally written for IFFR 2021]

 

January 15, 2020

Some Recent Indian Films

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Gantumoote (“Baggage”, 2019, Roopa Rao)

That a coming-of-age tale told from a girl’s point of view seems exceedingly fresh partly points to cinema’s conditioning of the audience to the primacy of the male gaze. Rao’s film is the hidden half of a story we are intimately familiar with: a lively, popular boy loses his way in life because of his romance. Rao filters the story entirely through the perspective of her protagonist Meera (Teju Belawadi, daughter of filmmaker Prakash Belawadi), in whose voiceover the film unfolds. At times superfluous and overpowering, the anachronistic voiceover oscillates between the adult Meera, trying to make rational sense of her experience, and her teen self, living life as it presents itself, and nevertheless provides fruitful tensions with the image. From the outset, Rao portrays the movie buff Meera as someone who likes to see (the interaction of screen and spectator has generally been the prerogative of male cinephiles). Through countless shot-reverse shot constructions, she makes the viewer share Meera’s awakening of desire. All through, the emphasis is on Meera’s autonomy, her right to be alone, to want alone, to suffer alone. Rao plays off specific gestures (Meera pulling her boyfriend by his shirt sleeves, his preventing her from biting her nails) against a series of moods (the anxious wait for first kiss in monsoon, the languid summer vacation), specific memories of Meera’s against her lack of knowledge of events beyond her purview. Even when it goes in and out of student film territory, Gantumoote is carried forth by Belawadi’s incredible turn. Her frame drooping in harmony with her eyebrows, she looks over the shoulders, hers or her beloved’s, her eyes conveying her inner life with the directness of subtitles. She is an instant star.

 

Ee.Ma.Yau (“R.I.P”, 2018, Lijo Jose Pellissery)

Ee.Ma.Yau deepens the suspicion I had watching Jallikattu: that Pellissery works like a painter. First comes the underlying structure; in this case, the social machinery of a small-town Christian community that springs into action following the death of a member. Overseen by a trusted friend of the deceased’s son, a doctor, a priest, a policeman, an undertaker, a printer, a coffin maker, a gravedigger and a music band galvanize around the dead alcoholic. Overlaid on this impersonal societal analysis, like colours on a drawing, are human emotions and characteristics: desire (of an man wishing a grand farewell to his dead father), malice (of a man who is bent on arousing suspicion around death), self-righteousness (of a priest who makes it his mission to complicate things), greed (of a coffin maker trying to sell an expensive unit), generosity (of a friend willing to abase himself to alleviate his friend’s suffering) and compassion (of a rival battered by the dead man). Like Jallikattu, this is a film about how these individual qualities overwhelm and destroy the community from within, turning a complex collective calculus to see off a man with civility into a spectacle of uncivility. Despite the (sometimes unwatchable) sordidness of the happenings, the stress is on the basic dignity of individuals. Pellissery’s characteristic, long Steadicam shots bridge indoors and outdoors, connecting the perspectives of characters that were only pieces in a communal mosaic before the death. The uniformly caffeinated performances are pitched above everyday realism, but below cartoonishness. While his work on the image is still strong—the floodlight-bathed coastal town has a distinct character—Pellissery has no qualms dealing in the abstract or being literal-minded: a blunt coda resumes the film’s philosophical motivations. A potent shot of cheap liquor you don’t want to try again.

 

Suttu Pidikka Utharavu (“Shoot at Sight”, 2019, Ramprakash Rayappa)

An unmitigated disaster. All it takes is five minutes to figure that this is the work of a bona fide hack. It’s the director’s third film and he’s apparently never heard of a tripod. One could say that Rayappa really puts the motion in motion picture. Three men (or four, who cares, certainly not the filmmaker) rob a bank and hole up in a cramped residential colony of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. A hot-headed officer (Mysskin, paying his bills) is on their heels. It so happens that a group of terrorists are hatching a bombing plot in an apartment in the same colony. The specificity of location suggests that the writer-director has a personal connection to it. But all we learn about the area is that it’s overridden by ostentatious and treacherous North Indians, and so the good policemen of Tamil Nadu are obliged to carry out a clean-up job. A big twist at the end is intended to overhaul our understanding of the events. The director is clearly aware that he’s been cheating his audience so far, and tries to cover his tracks with no avail. The result is a cheap prank in the vein of The Usual Suspects. There’s a monumentally irritating constable character whose stupidity is amped up solely for the big twist to work. The sole point of interest is the final reveal montage: in maybe fifty shots in three or so minutes, we get to hear the whole backstory—an indication of Tamil film audience’s increasing capacity to absorb a great volume of sudden information, a capacity thoroughly abused here.

 

Kavaludaari (“Crossroads”, 2019, Hemanth M Rao)

A valuable archaeological find was robbed and the family of the archaeologist murdered in 1977 at the peak of emergency—the original moment of the Indian public’s disenchantment with politics and its practitioners. The case, thought to be a stub, is pursued by a traffic policeman (Rishi) after 40 years when unidentified bones of three individuals are found during a road-widening project. The cop collaborates with the original officer who investigated the case (Anant Nag) to complete the puzzle. Co-writer of Andhadhun, Rao renders the idea of the police officer living with his case literally, as the people involved in the murder materialize in his apartment with post-production effects. The film starts out as a more ambitious portrait of men and their obsessions, problematizing the investigators themselves, but eventually settles on a traditional whodunit arc. Rao loads the narrative with information after information, plot thread after plot thread, whether they serve to enrich it or not, whether they are indispensable or not. The surfeit of information in itself—mimicking the cognitive experience of navigating today’s mass and social media—sustains a feeling of mystery and importance. The film is generally a couple of steps ahead of the audience, but imagines it is taking them along. In a crucial montage, the suspense is taken to an artificial crescendo through an intercutting between three different spaces. It’s supposed to create an anticipation about the identity of the killer, but what it does instead is produce an anxiety that something grave is underfoot. This mechanistic approach to thrill aside, Rao exhibits an admirable economy of exposition. Several sequences are constructed out of the fewest possible shots, the camera craning across space to furnish additional details. There’s a charming shot of the two investigators waiting in a car in which Anant Nag tries to trap a CGI fly as Rishi observes with amusement from the back seat.

 

Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (“Evidence and Eyewitness”, 2017, Dileesh Pothan)

Having eloped, Prasad and Sreeja (Suraj Venjaramoodu and Nimisha Sajayan) are on their way to the north of Kerala when Sreeja’s matrimonial gold chain is stolen by a criminal (an ostentatiously self-effacing Fahadh Faasil) who swallows it when caught red-handed. The trio ends up at the police station of a tiny town to sort out the issue. It’s an open-and-shut case with no information withheld from the audience, and the film rejects novelistic suspense and epistemological mysteries. The director keeps riffing in scenes set in the police station by weaving in peripheral incidents of petty crime, which increases tension by delaying plot progression. This allows him to mix contrasting tones to great effect, visually (as in the shot of the devastated wife sitting next to colourful balloons), narratively (the triviality of the crime set against the seriousness of consequences) and conceptually (the sanctity of a marriage having to pass through a thief’s rectum). In an unusual characterization, he describes the police force as a rather transparent establishment where information trickles up and down with ease. The cops get comfortable with the plaintiffs on a first name basis, while the latter grow familiar with all the policemen. More sharply, the film spirals out of the story of small-time felony to weave a quasi-philosophical picture of individuals caught up in the whirlpool of impersonal institutional imperatives. The film’s Rashomon-like network of perspectives are centripetally held by the act of stealing a gold chain. The husband (seeking the stolen valuable), the wife (seeking honour and justice), the criminal (seeking liberty), the constable who lets him escape (seeking a closure to the case) are acting on a constant drive for self-preservation, but they are also capable of tremendous, sporadic grace. The equivalence between Prasad and the criminal—echo of another Kurosawa, Stray Dog—is perhaps overly stressed, but it doesn’t take away from the considerable accomplishment of this film.

 

Kirumi (“Germ”, 2015, Anucharan)

Anucharan wrote, edited and directed this debut feature. Kathir (Kathir) is an unemployed young man, offended by the disdain of his friends and family for his predicament. When he gets an opportunity to work for the police as one of their black-market mercenaries—employed to gather information, collect bribes and rough up suspects—he sees a way out of his impasse. He makes quick progress, soaring up the preferential ladder until he becomes too big for his shoes. There’s very little feeling for milieu here. We don’t get a sense of Kathir’s social situation. He seems to glide in and out of lower-middle class domesticity, rubbing shoulders with an unmarked pair of financially struggling friends, an underground police informer (Charlie, playing the kind of decent everyman that so well suits him), politically-enabled gambling lynchpins and, later, higher-up police officers. What it lacks in nuance and local colour, Kirumi makes up for with a smart structure. Taking the titular microbe as analogy, it sketches the tragedy of a disruptive agent that infects the corrupt body of the police institution—kept from total collapse by internal rivalries and mutual suspicions—only to end up strengthening its immunity and be rejected. Kathir is presented as someone resenting his lack of power and esteem, and his short-lived ambitiousness a product of his power trip. His horniness is regularly invoked, I suppose, as a reference to his compensatory, self-destructive masculinity. The filmmaking is cranked up for effect and the emotional peaks are somewhat misplaced. But the ending, with its perversely welcome cynicism in the mould of Chinatown, is refreshingly anti-climactic, understated and conceptually at home.