Naalu Pennungal : Review

adoor to thakazhi : the road towards mediocrity

re-viewing naalu pennungal

rajmohan

The news about Adoor making, not one, but two films based on Jnanapith award winner Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s short stories, that too simultaneously, is interesting. Considering the fact that Adoor could manage to make only nine feature films during his long filmmaking career spanning more than three decades.

Now that Naalu Pennungal, a collection of four short films, adapted from four short stories of Thakazhi, is released, the mainstream critics in Kerala are full of praises for it, even, while the works of Thakazhi have long been forgotten by the readers of Kerala. The main reason for such a fate for Thakazhi’s works, one would assume to their mediocrity and superficiality. And for Adoor, the director of outstanding films like Elippathayam, Mukhamukham and Anantharam, one would expect him to transcend the stories to another level, giving an entirely new rendition to make his own film. But to be honest, the film comes out as a great disappointment.

All the four films depict the plight of women in the mid-20th Century Central Kerala, the limited space and time in which most of Thakazhi’s stories dwelled upon. Kunjipennu of the first film Oru Niyamalanghanathinte Katha (Story of a law-breaking act), tries to live a life of dignity after giving away her life as a prostitute, starts to work as a labourer as she also enters into an informal marriage with Pappukkutty. Kumari of the second film Kanyaka (The Virgin), is married-off to an impotent man, who is aroused only by food and money. Chinnu Amma of the third film, is craving to become a mother but deprived of it due to her husband’s inability. While Kamakshi of the fourth film Nitya Kanyaka (Eternal Virgin) is forced to play the role of an ever-sacrificing woman for the sake of her over-assertive family members. All the four women sacrifice their desires to the roles dictated to them by the society. The film, hence, successfully documents the condition of women in Kerala from 1940s to 1960s, with utmost care gone into recreating every detail of that period. It can be even argued that the condition of women of today is almost unchanged compared to their situation some five or six decades ago and therefore the film is still relevant. May be, one can even write pages on the performances by the actors, the cinematography and the music and so on. While agreeing with the merits of all these compartments, Naalu Pennungal still is a film devoid of any depth that is characteristic to most of Adoor films, otherwise. It remains the weakest of all his films.

Naalu Pennungal reminds us of the ‘New Wave’ Hindi films, which took to the centre stage of Indian cinema during the 1970s and 80s. Most of them depicted the exploited or oppressed conditions of the underprivileged in a superficial manner, with a ‘positive’ ending and sometime even with a call for a revolution! [Can’t we draw a parallel between the boy who throws stone at the feudal lord’s house in Ankur with the final sequence of Naalu Pennungal wherein Kamakshi plea that “can not a woman lead a life alone without the prop of a man?”] It is not surprising that the ‘New Wave’ of Hindi cinema failed miserably owing to its own hollowness and most of the torchbearers of the movement have now turned into creating Bollywood commercials, without any moral issues! While the parallel cinema in India mostly groped over the exterior of such social issues, Malayalam cinema, with filmmakers like Adoor, Aravindan and John Abraham made a sizeable leap. Adapting revolutionary approaches in form and content, these filmmakers took the sensibility of the film audience in Kerala to greater heights. Even before their films, the Malayalee sensibility underwent drastic changes, provoked by the new generation writers of Malayalam literature. It was not a small distance to travel from the social dramas of Thakazhi to the path breaking works by the likes of O V Vijayan or Anand.

And now Adoor returns to Thakazhi, to make a film as plane and shallow as a Thakazhi novel, perhaps the only such film in his career after his debut Swayamvaram. Naalu Pennungal becomes different from his first film only by its excessively polished looks and Adoor’s unwarranted concern for the minute details in making a period film. In fact, one is even forced to believe that Adoor is becoming more and more obsessed with the past.

To quote Andrey Tarkovsky in his book on cinema, “historical details should not distract viewer's attention just in order to convince him that film's action is really taking place in the distant past. Neutral interior decoration, neutral (although proper!) costumes, landscapes, modern language — all this will help us to talk only about what's most important”.

It seems that the most important factor in Adoor’s latest film is the ‘period’ in which the action takes place, and the simple and straightforward stories placed against it. Altogether making a soulless and uninspiring film that doesn’t go beyond clinical documentation.

Finally, we witness that tragic sight of Adoor, who made us believe that Indian cinema could venture into depths beyond the superficial issues, too joining the bandwagon of the ‘issue’ filmmakers.

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Tailpiece: We do have examples of how an ‘issue’ film, that too a women oriented one, can be a poetic experience. The Day I Became a Woman by Marzieh Makhmalbaf from Iran for one!

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