Ore Kadal : Review

in search of the sea within

re-viewing ore kadal

jayakrishnan

The film begins with Dr.Nathan receiving a phone call informing him about the illness of somebody very close to him, who wants to see him for the last time. Even the news that she is in her deathbed doesn’t move him and he refuses to visit her. The next scene he is seen driving a car in a city, where the flow of traffic gets disrupted due to an accident. Unconcerned about the accident, the only emotion created in him is mere irritation. Dr.Nathan is represented as an individual totally insensitive towards fellow individuals or the society. Of course, Dr.Nathan is an internationally reputed social scientist! For him the individuals around him are mere specimen for experimentation. He dubs this situation of living a free flowing life, unconcerned about the world outside, as ‘freedom’.

On the contrary, Deepthi, a housewife, is represented as an extra sensitive person in search of love. During the course of the film we get a clue about her childhood, that she had left her house in search of love and a bigger world outside. She is concerned about her job-hunting husband, anxious about her child’s ill health.

The plot of the film unfolds in a high-rise building in a city, which has a strange story in itself. It seems the building was started as a much ambitious project, but after completion of the top floors as planned, the balance of the work was abandoned by the builders. Hence the top floors of the building was occupied by higher class people of the society, like Dr.Nathan and the lower floors by lower-middle class families like that of Deepthi’s.

Nathan and Deepthi meet in a rather strange circumstance and their relationship develop into a sexual one. Deepthi’s fatal attraction to him was the culmination of her journey in search of love, while for Nathan it was just another casual relation, which contained not even an iota of love. But this relationship, which he enters into on the day he was celebrating the death of his aunt, the detachment of the final link to his family, would change his life forever.

Now Deepthi is pregnant and she believes that it was out of the relationship with Nathan. She visits Nathan, may be with an intention to inform him about this. But, Nathan’s indifference to her hurts her and thereafter she slowly slips into insanity, the reason for which can be attributed to Nathan’s assertion that he never believed in love, or may be due to the feel of guilt of cheating her husband, of having committed a sin.

At this juncture the fall of Nathan starts, fall from his self-cantered existence, the fall from his self-created false world. In other words, there starts his resurrection as a sensitive individual. But it required Bela, his girlfriend and the only person who knows him inside out, make him understand himself, to prompt him to discover the love, which lay deep inside him. In an affirmative end, Deepthi comes back to Nathan with her children and he accepts them with open arms.

Shyamaprasad’s latest film Ore Kadal [The Sea Within] based on a Bengali novel by Sunil Gangopadhya is an intense love story about people who are in search of their ideal companion in life, the people who are longing for love, long lost in their journey of life. The portrayal of man-woman relationship, especially that of an extramarital relationship, was never shown with such intensity in Malayalam cinema, at least after the ages of Padmarajan. Also, uncharacteristic to Malayalam mainstream cinema, “Ore Kadal” leaves many questions unanswered, to the discretion of the audience.

In a television programme in which Syamaprasad faced the questions of the audience, a young girl was seen asking him a question “what message are you trying to give to the Malayalee audience? Are you suggesting that extramarital relationships are OK?” To my great relief, Syamaprasad’s reply was that he had no message to deliver to the audience and through the film he was just suggesting a complex situation of life. Ore Kadal would definitely disappoint those who expect a film to suggest solutions for the complexities of life or expect a ‘message’ to be delivered by the film.

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