Director: Adoor Gopalakrishnan; Writer: Adoor Gopalakrishnan; Producer: K. Ravindranathan Nair; Cinematographer: Ravi Varma; Editor: M. Mani; Cast: P. Ganga, Balan K. Nair, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Krishna Kumar, Karamana Janardanan Nair, Thilakan, Vishwanathan, Ashokan, Lalitha, Vembayam, Krishnankutty Nair, John Samuel, Shanmugham Pillan, Thambi
Duration: 01:42:31; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 28.415; Saturation: 0.114; Lightness: 0.228; Volume: 0.123; Cuts per Minute: 9.607
Summary: Gopalakrishnan’s melodrama that opened up a
new direction in the genre in Malayalam film
while looking at the unpalatable aspects of
radical populism in Kerala. The first part is set
in the 1945-55 period just prior to the shortlived
1957 CPI electoral victory in the State. The
2nd part is ten years later, after 1964, when the
CPI split in two, later fragmenting even further.
The central character is Sridharan (Ganga), a
trade union leader who plays a key role in
winning a strike against mechanisation. He is
mercilessly beaten by thugs and has to go
underground. This episode is told from the
point of view of an idealist radical, Sudhakaran
(Vishwanathan as a boy, Ashokan as a man).
Years later, the old radicals have made their
compromises and Sridharan has become a
legendary emblem of integrity on whom the
defeated survivors have projected their
erstwhile radicalism. When he returns, there
follows bitter disappointment at the discovery
of the legendary hero’s human weaknesses. His
name is invoked by all factions as a rallying
cry, making his presence all the more
embarrassing. One day, he is found killed. With
the man safely out of the way, his image can
once again be mobilised, untarnished by the
complexities of real life. Violently attacked by
the CPI(M) establishment in Kerala, the film
works on several layers: in critiquing the state’s
left establishment it also critically evokes a
tradition of political melodrama in Kerala (cf.
Thoppil Bhasi’s scripts). It suggests that its
protagonist in all his roles - fiery leader, spent
force, political legend - is inescapably reduced
into stereotypical functioning, in the popular
melodramatic sense, of one kind or another.
The film thereby shifts the entire critique into
one where the mass culture generated by
incomplete capitalist growth merges with the
rhetoric of left activism, the whole masking
what the director suggests to be the major
problem: the absence of a valid indigenous
culture able to define the terms of its
engagement with capitalist systems.
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