Tag: Adoor

When Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of the internationally acclaimed Indian filmmakers, launched his first feature film Swayamvaram five decades ago, it was after many years of sustained effort. After passing out of FTII, Pune in 1965, he found it difficult to get a producer who would back him. Hence, he took the initiative of forming a cooperative for film production along with his friends. There was not much awareness of international cinema in his state of Kerala at that time. Realizing the need for establishing a film culture, he took yet another initiative of setting up a film society along with his associates and brought out literature on cinema. Adoor himself penned articles in Malayalam to spread awareness about the medium.

The establishing of the cooperative helped Adoor in launching his first film Swayamvaram which was jointly financed by the erstwhile Film Finance Corporation and his Chitralekha Film Cooperative. It is based on a story and script by Adoor Gopalakrishnan who was assisted by K. P. Kumaran. The film won National Awards for Best Film, Best Director (Adoor Gopalakrishnan), Best Actress (Sharada) and Best Cinematography (Mankada Ravi Varma). The golden jubilee is an occasion to look at the film now, analyze it and place it in Adoor’s oeuvre.

 

Exposition  

The film’s opening title sequence is shot inside a bus with a variety of passengers, some of whom are dozing off. Among them is a young couple with their faces animated. They exchange glances. The bus comes to a halt and we see them checking into a hotel room. The man asks his lover whether she regrets it. He wonders whether they gave enough thought to it. We realize that they might have eloped.  A group of devotees pass by on the road in a procession chanting bhajan. It may appear odd to see the film showing the couple making love with the background of the bhajan on the soundtrack. The director’s intention here is revealed in Adoor’s interview in which he has said that he paired bhakti (devotion) with sex in that scene. [1] The essence of bhajan is bhakti. By being paired with bhakti, sex gets associated with devotion as another aspect of it. Separated from their families, they are mutually dependent on each other which leads to devotion as well as the fear of losing the loved one as seen in the dream sequences which follow.

 

Synopsis

In Swayamvaram, a young couple, Sita (Sharada) and Vishwam (Madhu) fall in love perhaps against the wishes of their parents and leave their village to live together in the city. They face the challenge of surviving on their own in a climate of acute unemployment. As Vishwam’s literary aspirations are crushed, he takes up a teaching job but loses it. Later he gets only a low paying job of a clerk in a sawmill that too by replacing a dismissed employee who worked for twelve years there. Now that the couple have a child, Vishwam has to bear with the insinuation of the previous employee who stalks him. Vishwam is haunted by the hounding but his job is important to him. When he falls sick the situation becomes grave.

 

Structure

Swayamvaram (1972) starts with the journey to the city of the young couple with their illusions followed by the hard reality they experience there. What Sita goes through has some parallel with the female protagonist Sita in the epic “Ramayana” which gives a resonance to the film. The title refers to the swayamvaram (meaning one’s own choice) of Sita who wedded Rama out of many princes in the epic. There is the picture depicting it that hangs on the wall of the house of Vishwam and Sita. Vishwam is her own choice for Sita in the film and not that of her family so it is a swayamvaram for her too. But Sita in the film is not exactly in the mould of Sita in the epic. She elopes with her lover to live together with him, making the subject daring for its time.

 

In the Forests of the Plight

Just as Sita in the epic had to undergo hardships by having to go to forest, in the film also Sita has to go through adversities. The dream sequences in the early part of the film portend Sita losing Vishwam. He climbs down the rocks towards the sea as she keeps gesturing to him to come back. In another dream sequence Vishwam lies down keeping his head on the railway track with the approaching train’s sound on the soundtrack. She runs upto him and forces him to get up. In yet another sequence she chases him in the woods and loses him. It has memorable tracking shots of her running in the forest looking out for him. Sita being renounced by Rama in the last part of the epic (Uttarakandam) has its echo in Sita losing Vishwam in the end.

 

Illusion & Reality

Sita and Vishwam are shown acting like lovers in commercial cinema in the dream sequences. The theme of illusion is taken up in a dream sequence showing posters of hero and heroine in love from Malayalam commercial cinema in which love is romanticized. Sita and Vishwam would have grown up watching such films and imagined that life will be rosy as it is depicted in films. Later in Swayamvaram it turns out very hard to survive as job is very difficult to get for both of them. Without any support system Sita and Vishwam are dependent on each other. Reality dawns on Sita when Vishwam falls ill.

 

Retrenchment Theme

Vishwam happens to see briefly a leftist party meeting in which the speaker talks about how the working class is misled by various parties. He adds that all of them obstruct the struggle of workers and their liberation. Much later in Swayamvaram after losing his job, there is a scene which shows a political march in protest against retrenching workers. Vishwam quietly watches it passing by. It seems the film was not given an award at the Moscow International Film Festival in which it was nominated. Adoor has said that the jury was surprised that Vishwam didn’t join the march of the workers which costed the film an award. Vishwam himself has been retrenched from his job. Yet he doesn’t join the march. Adoor has said that the reason is “he doesn’t see himself as part of this. This has to be understood because the other thing is simplistic that he also joins it. That’s the kind of films we used to send to Moscow.” [1] Vishwam doesn’t belong to the working class. Hence it wouldn’t have been appropriate to show him in the stock manner which would satisfy the expectation of the audience and an agenda driven jury. This is an important aspect of Swayamvaram which makes it stand apart.

The theme of retrenchment has been treated in its complexity in Swayamvaram. While the sawmill owner appears to be unfair in terminating a long-time employee, the friendly tutorial college owner with debts is forced to ask Vishwam to leave. The scene in which the owner takes Vishwam for a drinking spree is memorable.

 

Safety and Security of Women

Women’s safety is yet another theme in the film. Vishwam and Sita move to a second hotel which is cheaper. Sita gives away her golden bangles, perhaps the only precious jewelry she has to Vishwam. It’s for buying a mangalsutra (golden signet in a chain worn by a married woman) to let men know of her marital status and ward them off. This scene also suggests that Sita and Vishwam are living together perhaps without getting married. Sita is terrified by the way she sees a drunkard when she opens the hotel room door on hearing the knocking of the door. She is even afraid of opening the door when Vishwam arrives. Sita wearing the mangalsutra doesn’t restrain smuggler Vasu who has an eye on her. Three drunkards try to barge into her house and make unsavoury remarks about her.

 

The Women in the Film

Swayamvaram came up with very well etched characters, particularly women. Sita is a bold woman who takes the courage to leave her family to live with her lover. She is resolute and strongly willed unlike Vishwam who keeps wondering whether they made the right choice. Kalyani (K.P.A.C.  Lalitha), is a prostitute living in the opposite house whose husband visits her to collect money for liquor. She is smart enough not to let him exploit her at some point. The middle-aged widow Janaki (Adoor Bhavani), the rice seller neighbour of Sita, is very helpful to her. Sita protects herself from the prying eyes of men and lives with dignity. It is impossible for the smuggler Vasu to make advances to her as Kalyani says.

 

Casting

Casting of Madhu as Vishwam was right as he underplays the role unlike most of the actors of that period who were known for their dramatic style of acting. Sharada was known as a talented actress and she had already won the National Award for Best Actress for Thulabharam (1968). She was the right choice for Sita and she got her second National award for Swayamvaram. Gopi turned out to be a great discovery by giving a haunting performance as the fired employee. The rest of the cast also performed well in the film.

 

The Ending

In the end when Vishwam passes away, Vishwam’s colleague suggests that she can live with his family. Janaki tells Sita to return to her parents. Sita rejects both the options. Once again, she makes her own choice. Her condition can be looked at in terms of the parallel of her situation with Sita in “Ramayana” who was renounced by Rama in Uttarakandam. In the last scene there are the sounds of thunder and pouring rain as Sita feeds her child. Water leaking from the roof falls down over the picture of swayamvaram on the wall which is lit up by the lightning. The last shot is ambiguous as it shows Sita having an eye on the closed door, concerned about safety. While she is willing to face the world on her own, the future is uncertain.

Swayamvaram is one of the first Malayalam films that featured direct recording of sound (synchronized sound) and outdoor locales. It’s also considered to be the first film in Indian cinema that used sound as a leitmotif: There is the recurrent sound of wood being cut in the sawmill. This cutting sound is especially powerful when Vishwam passes away.

In an interview with C.S. Venkiteswaran, Adoor has said that the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) rejected his application for finance for a film based on a script written by C.N. Sreekandan Nair as it was a love story. FFC didn’t sanction the loan because the script didn’t take up any of the issues facing India. [2] Perhaps the issue of unemployment that Swayamvaram deals with helped in getting the finance from FFC. To compare it with Adoor’s second film onwards upto Anantaram, the approach in the latter is that of a biography of an individual. The films are very much rooted in the social landscape of Kerala but they are not issue based. Even in Swayamvaram, while the story deals with a social issue, it has other dimensions too. Its parallel with the epic “Ramayana” gives it a connotative meaning.

In retrospect the title reflects Adoor’s own choice of treading the untrodden path of art cinema with all its risks. He has been hugely successful in creating a body of work that is world class and becoming a major force in Indian cinema. A pioneer of the new Malayalam cinema movement, he inspired several other art filmmakers. Swayamvaram’s daring subject, complex treatment of the theme of retrenchment, parallel with the epic and ambiguous ending mark Adoor’s first film, revealing an original style of filmmaking which has helped the film’s longevity even after five decades.

 

References

1. VK Cherian in conversation with Adoor Gopalakrishnan, The creative world of Adoor Gopalakrishnan-Episode One-Swayamvaram Swayamvaram50 Channel on YouTube, 2022
2. S. Venkiteswaran in conversation with Adoor Gopalakrishnan, C.S. Venkiteswaran in Conversation with Adoor Gopalakrishnan Part 2: Film Societies, Festivals and Early Films, Sahapedia.org, 2021

 

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Anantaram (1987), his fifth film and its three preceding films have a common approach of a biography of an individual. They get deeper and deeper as we move from his second film onwards. While Kodiyettam (1978) follows the carefree Shankaran Kutty attaining maturity, in Elippathayam (1982), Unni is like a rat in a trap, caught in his feudal ways. When Sreedharan a revolutionary communist leader makes a comeback from hiding in Mukhamukham (1984), he is a defeated man much to the dismay of the people who look up to him. Anantaram, which differs from them with its narrative strategy, is Adoor’s magnum opus. Analysing it will help in understanding its import and what Adoor achieved in it.

If one attempts to write the story in brief for Anantaram, one may end up putting down its plot instead. In place of the terms, “story” and “plot”, David Bordwell uses the terminology of Russian Formalists who call them as fabula (sometimes translated as “story”) and syuzhet (usually translated as “plot”). [1] In Anantaram the fabula has to be constructed by the viewer from the syuzhet which is presented by the film. Ajayan also known as Ajayakumar (performed exceptionally well by both Sudheesh as a boy and Ashokan as a youth), the protagonist of Anantaram, tells his story in one way and as the title goes (Anantaram means ‘and then’/‘whereupon’), he tells his story once again which doesn’t have much correspondence with the previous one. There have been films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) having different versions or points of view of the same events. In Anantaram the two versions are told in the first-person narrative by the same person which is rather new. The English title of the film is ‘Monologue’. It is in fact a double monologue and its structure can be called as “Double monologue/ narrative in the same first-person point of view”.

In his first version, Ajayan recounts that he was an unwanted child abandoned by his mother after his birth in a hospital. The doctor in the hospital raises him as an adopted son affectionately. His extraordinary talents alienate him from others except his foster brother Balu (played with a quiet presence by Mammootty) who is studying medicine.  When he grows up and goes to college, he gets estranged from Balu– a doctor now – too when he gets strangely attracted to Balu’s newly wedded wife Sumangali called Suma (performed sensuously as well as hauntingly by Shobhana). With the feeling of guilt due to that he leaves home and he is apparently driven into suicide. Ajayan comes out quite the contrary in his second version in which he is far from being a gifted child. Suma resembles Nalini (also played by Shobhana) with whom he was in love, which torments him further.

Ajayan has been abandoned by his mother somewhat like Karna in the epic “Mahabharata”. Balu reminds us of Duryodhana who bonds with Karna, admires his great skill in archery and feels that he doesn’t get his due owing to his pedigree. Ajayan comes to know about his real parentage like Karna. While such a reference to the epic can enhance the appreciation of Anantaram, the characters in the film are not in the epic mould. The literary antecedents to the dual personality that comes through in Anantaram can be traced to several works which use the strategy of doubling identities. Of particular interest is Dostoevsky’s “The Double: A Petersburg Poem” (1846) in which Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a titular councilor, encounters his friendly doppelgänger. The Golyadkin Jr. though turns his bitter foe taking his place causing Golyadkin Sr. a nervous breakdown. Golyadkin Sr. is probably a schizophrenic who is driven to insanity. In Anantaram too it could be one of the interpretations as there are indications such as Balu asking Ajayan in his second version whether he has taken his medicine.  Mikhail Bakhtin developed the concept of ‘polyphony’ meaning multiple voices about which he has written, “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combined but are not merged in the unity of the event”. According to Bakhtin the multiple voices haven’t become fully independent in “The Double…” unlike in Dostoevsky’s longer novels. [2] The structure of Anantaram can be viewed in this light. The two voices in Anantaram are that of the protagonist but they are quite distinct. Since they are presented in two versions, the polyphony in Anantaram could be called polyphony of the protagonist in time.

The interpretation of Ajayan driven into insanity due to schizophrenia is a denotative meaning of the film which fits up to a point. The two stories that Ajayan narrates are about the two separate realities in which he experiences to exist. While the first one is shot in the realistic style, some of the scenes in the second are expressionistic. Nalini in Ajayan’s second story could be part of his imagination. Adoor pulls off quite a coup by having Shobhana play both Suma and Nalini to indicate that Ajayan is strangely infatuated with Suma as she appears like Nalini. The other world, that is imagined by him, dominates the perception of Ajayan. But just when we create the fabula (story) based on this, we’re confused by seeing Ajayan’s roommate pick up a rose from the floor and ask Ajayan whether someone was there. We have an unreliable narrator who creates ambiguities.

The narrational gaps in Anantaram call for multiple interpretations of a higher level, bringing out its connotative meaning. Regarding how to do the interpretation, David Bordwell has written that “the procedural slogan of art-cinema narration might be: “interpret this film, and interpret it so as to maximize ambiguity””. [3] Going by that, we can discern the unintegrated personality of Ajayan who has in him mutually opposite elements. He has both extraversion and introversion. The servants appear helpful but not really so. His foster father might even be his real father. There is a hint that the yogini who is affectionate towards him could be his mother who abandoned him. He is all admiration for Balu but later he notices Balu ogling at a lady who is on her way back home after bathing. He can love Nalini but she is not real. Her look-alike Suma is a real person loving whom is forbidden. Like his counting of the steps in odd numbers and then in even numbers, he encounters things in dual form. It is very hard for him to synthesize such contradictory elements which push him to the edge. This interpretation of unintegrated personality is a view of Ajayan that is created in our mind by putting together the two versions that are narrated by the protagonist Ajayan.

Adoor’s illuminating interpretation of Anantaram is that it is about storytelling as mentioned in his “Director’s Statement” in his website. To quote a few lines from it, “[Ajayan] is drawing up on the experiences from his life basically from two stand-points – that of an introvert and an extrovert, the two positions we all keep shifting from time to time…Each story picks and chooses from those experiences from his life that go to prove its theme. The stories do not contradict themselves, instead they complement each other. The stories jell together because there is a certain built-in ambivalence in his life.” [4].

It speaks for the richness of Anantaram that the presence of the two independent voices in the film supports a dialogical discourse too. While narrating his stories, Ajayan doesn’t find the self to be coherent but alienated and fragmented. His dual voices point to a dualistic or divided self with a doubled and divided mind. Hence the two stories that his two voices narrate are like thoughts of two different minds. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to the film suggests a dialogical discourse.

Such an approach will lead to yet another interpretation: Unravelling the mystery of one’s psyche and searching for one’s identity may lead to one’s self-destruction. In this view, Ajayan’s search for identity starts right from when we see him crying as a child for mother’s milk. Questions on who are his mother and father haunt him. True to the meaning of his name Ajayan (the invincible one), his performance is extraordinary in studies, sports etc. but he excels in everything perhaps to make up for his lack of identity. The film makes an acute observation that super competence may end up as a failure. Yearning for a caring woman, Ajayan develops a liking for an elder girl Lata which is thwarted by a couple of senior boys. He gets attracted to his foster brother Balu’s sensuous wife Suma which ruins his studies. Curiously, the meaning of Suma’s full name, Sumangali, is “a married woman whose husband is alive”. He confesses his feeling of guilt for his forbidden feelings for Suma which apparently leads to his suicide. The second version is clearly in a different voice, making us recognize that there are in fact multiple voices in one person which may come into conflict. Perhaps the voice in the first version overstated his ability as the voice in the second one doesn’t portray him as gifted. “Ajayan” turns out to be an ironical name. The two versions view the servants differently. The three caring servants in the first are made to look iconic like the male counterparts of the three witches in Macbeth, inflicting pain on him perhaps because they know that he is the foster son of their employer. Later Ajayan comes to know that his foster father whom he has been calling as “uncle” and the yogini could be his real parents. He must have been very much disappointed that he was denied his identity. While the love for Suma is forbidden, the love for Nalini cannot be materialized. When he goes to meet her in her house, she is called Malini which is the name of a yakshi (seductive spirit). His identity as a lover is in question. Ajayan doesn’t find the world knowable. In the end he says that there are some more things that he hasn’t told us and some he has forgotten, hinting that there could be more versions. But he is nowhere near fathoming his psyche. The ending is unresolved. Ajayan’s problem is that he is very sensitive and he is aware of the futility of his search which torments him and leads him to his self-destruction.

Some of the filmmakers from Kerala ushered in a different kind of modernity to Indian art cinema. As M. K. Raghavendra has written, “Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Anantaram, 1987), G Aravindan (Esthappan, 1980) and John Abraham (Amma Ariyan, 1980) eschew the ‘critique of society’ model in Indian art cinema and reintroduce (authorial/character) subjectivity as strategies… [Kerala] appears to have arrived at its own kind of modernity without the mediation of the West.” [5]. Among them, Adoor came up with arguably an innovation in form to depict a dual human personality in Anantaram. It would figure in the top 5 all-time great Indian films that rank high internationally although it is not as widely known as it should be. For, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Anantaram is a monumental work in Indian cinema and has its place in world cinema as well.

 

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References

1. Bordwell, David. “Narration in the Fiction Film”, New York, Routledge, 2014, pp 49-50.
2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 8th printing, 1999, p 6& p 220.
3. Bordwell, David. “Narration in the Fiction Film”, New York, Routledge, 2014, p 212.
4. Gopalakrishnan, Adoor . “Director’s Statement”, 2017.
5. Raghavendra, M.K. “Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema: Approximate Terms and Concepts”, New Delhi, Routledge India; 1st edition, 2020, p 121.

 

Film: Anantaram
Year: 1987
Duration: 125 minutes
Language: Malayalam
Editing: M. Mani
Music: M.B. Srinivasan
Cinematography: Mankada Ravi Varma
Producer: K. Ravindran Nair
Story, Script and Direction: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

 

See also:

https://filmcriticscircle.com/journal/the-cinema-of-adoor-gopalakrishnan/