Director: G. Aravindan; Writer: G. Aravindan; Cinematographer: Shaji N. Karun; Editor: Bose; Cast: Gopi, Smita Patil, Srinivas, Mohan Das, Murali, Chandran Nair
Duration: 01:37:32; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 308.466; Saturation: 0.096; Lightness: 0.314; Volume: 0.056; Cuts per Minute: 5.075; Words per Minute: 15.193
Summary: Unfolding in exquisitely photographed poetic
rhythms and coloured landscapes, this is the
simple but cynical tale of Muniyandi (Srinivas),
a labourer on the Indo-Swiss Mooraru farm in
Kerala. He brings a wife, Shivagami (Patil),
from the temple town of Chidambaram. She
befriends Shankaran (Gopi), the estate
manager and amateur photographer with a
shady past. Their friendship transgresses the
hypocritical but deeply felt behavioural codes
the local men inherited from previous social
formations: i.e. that women are to be denied
what men are allowed to enjoy. The tragedy
that ensues (Muniyandi’s suicide, Shankaran’s
descent into alcoholism and Shivagami’s
withering into a worn-out old woman)
condenses the tensions between socioeconomic
change (as tractors and machinery
invade the landscape) and people’s refusal to
confront the corresponding need to change
their mentality. The tension is, however, most
graphically felt in the way Shivagami’s life-force
is extended into the naturescape, which is shot
around her with garish colour (e.g. purple
flower-beds) suggesting that the very nature of
Kerala’s beauty and fertility, as she represents
it, has been irredeemably corrupted from
within. The film then shifts to the equally
oppressive cloisters of the Chidambaram
temple, as Shankaran and Shivagami meet once
more: he is there to purify himself through
religious ritual while she is now employed to
look after the footwear of devotees and
tourists. The nihilist film ends with a rising
crane shot as the camera can only avert its gaze
and escape, tilting up along a temple wall
towards an open sky.
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