It’s been four days since I saw the
Tamil film director Bala’s latest feature Paradesi (Vagabond) and I’m
still smarting. At the sheer impunity with which Bala does the cinematic medium
an injustice. At the manner in which he throttles his own labour of love to our
horror and, I suspect, his joy. At his presumptuousness in determining, for his
viewers, the degree and meaning of bleakness and misery that they can endure,
before their sanity and reason abandon them.
My situation as a viewer vis-a-vis
Bala’s as a director can best be explained by drawing an analogy with a
situation that Clarice Starling, the feisty heroine of the Hannibal series,
finds herself in. On the way to visit Hannibal for the first time, she meets
Dr. Chilton, in charge of the section of the asylum that contains Hannibal.
Chilton hands Clarice a bunch of photographs of Hannibal’s victims, post-facto.
Clarice, while looking at them, feels Chilton’s unblinking gaze upon her. She
doesn’t know which is worse: the photographs or his gaze.
Except that in this case, the actual
perpetrator is the very same one who gazes at us, waiting for us to flinch,
squirm, curl up in disgust and ultimately plead for mercy.
At this stage I ought to make a
disclaimer: I’m hardly a stranger to brutality and misery on screen. John
Hillcoat’s ‘The Proposition’ is a thing of lacerating, surpassing beauty,
oozing poetry alongside blood, one of my eternal favourites. I’ve found myself
transformed into someone who regards, with horrified fascination, the twisted,
gruesome fates that befall characters in Pankaj Advani’s films, so textured and
vigorous are his narratives. Despite my ample reservations about Mel Gibson’s
cinematic sensibilities, I’m still in awe of his craft as a filmmaker and as an
innovative manufacturer of dread. And it is totally to his credit that Shekhar
Kapur succeeds in making the rugged landscapes of central India as
impressionistically harsh and brutal as the characters in ‘Bandit Queen’.
The disclaimer has a twofold
purpose: firstly, to establish, for the sake of this discussion, a reasonable
standard for onscreen brutality. Secondly, to undercut Bala’s claim (or
reputation) of creating harsh narratives about people on the fringes of society,
apropos this film. Its purpose is not, by any means, to make a judgment upon
the mental hardiness of an individual based upon the degree and extent of
onscreen brutality he or she can endure.
The particulars
of the story can be summed up in a couple of sentences: the whole lot of
able-bodied men, women and children in a drought-stricken village in the Tamil
hinterland is duped into indentured labour on a colonial tea plantation, by a
middleman who is a native. The protagonist, Rasa (Atharva), the village
drummer, falls in love with the feisty Angamma (Vedhicka) from the same village
and impregnates her, before being whisked away to work on the tea plantation,
leaving her behind with child. Once these are out of the way, the film becomes
a chronicle of the brutalisation of hapless village folk at the hands of nature
(unsystematically) and at the hands of colonial rulers and overseers
(systematically). Rasa has the misfortune of being a (male) Bala protagonist,
which entitles him, in particular, to exceptional cruelty.
Indeed,
Bala uses his protagonist to establish a hierarchy of exploitation: before half
the village is sold into slavery, Rasa is ill-treated, marginalised and
discriminated against by the village folk themselves. Though never explicitly
stated in the film, Rasa is obviously a Paraiyar.
In the opening scene of the film, the fact of his untouchability is insidiously
established: he approaches the home of a village elder while cheerfully
addressing her as his aunt and squats outside her home, in the courtyard, while
she rummages inside for some food for him. She finally brings him some nearly
spoilt leftovers, which he regards bemusedly for a moment, before gobbling them
up. The manner of the lady towards him is perfectly cordial, even warm. The
undercurrent of condescension, however, is distinct and well-worn. Rasa has the
added disadvantage of being unbelievably cheerful and naive, a child trapped in
a tall, strapping body, with the result that he’s almost always taken for
granted by everyone he meets. When he bashfully passes off his fatherhood as
being the result of Angamma’s decision, it is not a flaky, roguish refusal to
shoulder responsibility, but a genuine statement, something we can understand,
but Maragamma (Dhansika), a female co-worker on the plantation to whom it is
addressed, cannot quite.
Given that Bala’s animalistic heroes
are the rage among his fans and detractors alike, this kind of a gentle,
submissive protagonist is a complete surprise (though his eating habits are woefully
in line with those of his mates from the Bala pantheon). His intransigence in
portraying the more unsavoury (but never far from honourable) aspects of his
protagonists counterbalanced against their relatively wholesome, likeable ones
always lends an interesting dynamic to the arcs of these characters, playing up
the question of their ultimate redeemability almost to the point of suspense.
Rasa is a character designed to milk our sympathy, a babe in the woods who is
exploited even by those who love him. With teeth-gnashing perversity, then,
Bala has subverted the very trope of the animalistic hero, by making Rasa
arrive at the film’s only piece of insight: no animal enslaves its own kind; human
beings do.
But what of the specifics of such
enslavement, its terms and conditions? What of all the groundwork of
establishing that Rasa is an untouchable? By depicting the exploitation of Rasa
at the hands of the British as being in a continuum with his exploitation at
the hands of his village folk, the film is robbed of any authentic context. It simply
becomes a dreary, unending chronicle of oppression. And I’m not even going into
issues of sociological or historical accuracy. There is no distinct
characterisation of the oppressors or of the oppressed. The dialogues studiedly
turn away from conveying anything about the inner states of the characters
under such extreme conditions. We have no way of knowing what the slaves feel
about their perpetual servitude: they are not granted the luxury of catharsis,
let alone any rational assessment of their conditions that might engender
resistance to such exploitation. To what end is such rudimentary expression
used in the film? None apparently.
The scene of the unscrupulous
middleman wheedling the men-folk of the village to take loans and repay them by
working on the tea plantations is shot, cut and scored with all the subtlety of
a public service announcement against railway ticket touts. This is a crying
shame for it is the fulcrum on which the film and the fates of its principal
characters rest.
The villagers seem to be working in
shifts alternate to the colonialists and the Indian overseers to ensure Rasa
does not experience a moment of happiness. The photography by Chezhiyan,
employs a filter that casts a leaden, sepulchral pall on the locations and
people, making them look as though they’ve survived a volcanic eruption. There
are sweeping crane and track shots of the parched, barren landscape as a human
stream wends its way across it, on the way to a putative Eden. At least here, Bala
is at his most effective, conveying the interminability of the journey through
umpteen shots of the endless landscape. GV Prakash Kumar’s dirge plays on the
soundtrack doughtily; the singer’s voice a sustained wail of lament, soldiering
on. The human beings are always framed in wide or mid-shots, underlining their
frailty, their insignificance in a universe conspiring to tear them apart.
As the film wears on, the peculiar
tendency of Bala to pile on misery upon his characters while continually denying
them a release, reaches alarming levels. Several years after the arrival of
Rasa and his co-habitants at the plantation, a serious outbreak of the 'flu in
the labourers’ camp forces the masters to summon a visiting doctor, when the
(literally) home-grown doctor is out of his depth. This visiting doctor is
Tamil, with an Englishwoman for a wife. Upon arriving at the camp they are
appalled to see the living conditions there, not to mention the healthcare
facilities. What they proceed to do makes us nearly as horrified as them. They
turn out to be shameless proselytes, rounding up all the emaciated, sick and
dying slaves into an enormous circle and dancing at its centre, as though it
were the wedding of their child. All in praise of the Lord. The slaves chant,
sway, leap and rejoice at their deliverance with a collectively deadened look
on their faces, like a choir of kids tonelessly reciting a prayer they are
untouched by. The look on the faces of the proselytes, meanwhile, is ecstatic.
Once this macabre farce is over and the flu has served its purpose of felling
an important character, it is simply cast aside to make way for a sucker punch
of a climax.
A particular scene is quite
revealing about the attitude Bala has towards his material and, dare I say,
towards his viewers. When the primary British overlord of the plantation
attempts to molest a female worker, her husband tries to resist him. Rasa, who
is working nearby, jumps in to help. Before long, of course, they are overpowered
and roundly thrashed by the guards and the overseer, all of whom are natives. Leaving
them cowing and whimpering, the overseer, a bearded pehelwan, stands atop a huge boulder in the centre of the static whirlpool
that the tea gardens resemble, and casts a dire warning. Bala cannot bring
himself to be concerned with the specifics of the warning beyond the first
couple of lines: he chooses, instead, to frame the overseer making grotesque facial
contortions while brandishing a stick, as if scaring away eight year olds,
while the background score reaches its most foreboding yet, drowning out his
voice entirely.
For that is precisely how Bala views
his characters and his viewers: as eight year olds he can pummel into a
howling, blubbering mass of tears, with his supposedly devastating stories and
heart-rending, thunderous scores, with actors that bawl and growl and flail
their limbs like wounded animals, playing characters condemned to burn in a
hell of despair forevermore. Within these parameters, the climax of this film
is remarkably effective. It is to the credit of Bala and his actors- playing at
such keening levels of melodrama- that they never fall prey to hamming. The
final line of dialogue torn out from Rasa amidst his wails, the camera as it
swoops up from his broken, prone body to circle over the verdant hell, his
blasted sentiments put into song and the pathetic, wretched cries of him and
his family on the soundtrack as the camera returns to them again; these are
indelible images and sounds, seething with nihilistic despair.
For
Bala, bleakness and misery are both journey and destination. If the
overwhelming emotional state of the film were to be charted in dimensional terms,
then, against a temporal scale, the film is forced to be static until the
climax. There is nothing to indicate that the slaves (or at least Rasa) possess
an emotional graph that changes over time. Spatially too, the film is a dream
narrative masquerading as a realist one: the feeling of dread and despair is
all-pervading, negating the urge to really be anywhere. The final tragedy and
the enduring misery do not feel arrived at; there is no trajectory, no sense of
the characters traversing different psychological terrains to meet their doom.
There is no room for any other emotion than abject, helpless sorrow. The film
courses along a kymographic plateau, as it were, the cinematic equivalent of
muscle fatigue, where whatever the changes in the load, the tonal response of
the muscle to it remains the same: a constantly straight line. We are past
caring, observing from a disembodied point of view as our nerve endings and sensory
responses become palsied, and finally, leprous.
Which, I
suspect, is exactly the opposite of what Bala intends. I don’t think that
having our senses deadened to such terrible occurrences on screen is an
intended consequence of his quest. No, Bala wants to keep wounds amply raw,
fresh and wet. So that when he fires his next salvo to cause his creations
mortal anguish, they can only howl and writhe in pain. To our inarticulate horror
and sympathy. It is the paralytic acceptance of suffering, a mute, subhuman,
bestial mode of existence that he is enamoured by. And he will do anything to
make us, his viewers, experience it, the emotional sadist and voyeur to boot
that he is. The dignity of narrative arcs and well-defined characters, of
nuance, of gay laughter amidst darkness, of unitary defiance and resistance in
the face of institutionalised oppression, of a cathartic denunciation of such
monstrous villainy, those be damned. In his universe of ineffable pain, he is kadavul.
Naan Kadavul, he seems to continue to proclaim with every frame of this
film. With that very proclamation, he has unwittingly provoked me to
articulate. After a very long time. Personally speaking, this is rather an
achievement on his part. To him, then, I say: Enna kadavule? Appadi
oru kadavulmela enakku nambikkai illa.
