Director: K. Balachander; Writer: K. Balachander; Producer: Rajam Balachandar, Pushpa Kandaswamy; Cinematographer: B.S. Lokanath; Editor: N.R. Kittu; Cast: Rajesh, Saritha, Pavitra, Ahalya, Delhi Ganesh, Prabhakar, Charle, Jaya Gopi, Vairam Krishnamurthy, Lalita, T.K.S. Saraswathi, Veeraiah, Syman, Sundaramurthy, Dhanapal, Santanam, T.S. Mohan, Ramani, Kumar, Ramudu, Kittu, Gopala Krishna
Duration: 02:33:36; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 104.759; Saturation: 0.065; Lightness: 0.367; Volume: 0.201; Cuts per Minute: 11.035
Summary: After the critical success of Thanneer
Thanneer (1981), Balachander pushes his
jaundiced view of (Tamil but also general
Indian) politics further with this grotesque
drama symbolising the conditions of life in
independent India. The central character is
Thenmozhi (Saritha), a textile worker, who
loves and marries Ulaganathan (Rajesh), a
pragmatic politician whose daily compromises
eventually lead to provoking communal riots
and callous corruption. A strong and lively
woman, Thenmozhi ends up killing her corrupt
husband. The film repeatedly evokes, in its
political references, the old tradition of political
propaganda in Tamil film, with numerous
symbols and clear distinctions between good
and evil: most notably in the climactic
sequence when the wife, stepping on to a dais
to garland her husband, has a knife hidden in
the garland with which she publicly stabs him.
Sridhar Rajan described the film’s opening as ‘a
stunning surrealist streetside strewn with
corpses [a]nd, later, we see the evocative
visuals of men with loudspeakers growing out
of their throats, each vying democratically to
down the other vocally in the battle of the
ballot’. The grotesque side of the story is
evident in e.g. Thenmozhi’s deformed brother
born on Independence Day and named
Swatantram (i.e. Independence) and in her
blind father, a former freedom fighter who is
corrupted by Ulaganathan’s promise to pay for
an operation to restore his sight.
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