God is in the details

Unaware of the atmospheric allusions to the impending rapture, I set out to watch Suseendran's Azhagar Saamiyin Kuthirai this past Friday. Having already read Baskar Sakthi's short story I was fully primed for the humor which is one of the constant undercurrents running through the film. No situation is too serious, no communal injustice so grave that a joke may not be made at its expense. And yet we are never aware of sitting on the cusp of a joke, thanks in large part to the constant ebb and flow of the narrative and the absorbing background score. A parallel presence, and one that actually serves to relegate the humor to the undercurrent where it belongs, is the persistent manner in which the film engages with the concept of 'god'.

Consider for a moment the level of control a creator exercises over his/her story; the ability to introduce, govern growth and eventually redeem a cast of characters. The scale of his world is entirely in his hands - what details he furnishes and what he discerns as worth omitting are all purely decisions on his part. And yet the best creations are often the ones where we do not see his hands. After all, visible strings and their movement will immediately reduce the simulated reality to a puppet show and no artist wants to be indicted with the creation of a puppet show (unless that was the original intention). The artistic pride of a creator, however, is constantly egging him to leave his mark behind. "How will this world remember you when you are gone?" it asks. (I think a morbid fascination with death is a cheap commodity among artists. This is a supply driven economy.) So the onus is on the imagineer (credit to Disney) to be memorable without being obtrusive. So much so that Roland Barthes even wrote an essay questioning his existence. In this sense the creator has much in common with his capitalized counterpart - The Creator (God).

Azhagar Saamiyin Kuthirai the film expands on Baskar Sakthi's eponymous short story with a few simple additions and modifiers. When I say expands I do not mean just in canvas alone, which it does by providing the real horse (a curious throwback to the white steeds of the Ashwamedha) and its childlike owner a background, I also imply an expansion in the philosophical implications due to the modifiers. While the story of the horse's owner and his beauteous bride attempt to flesh out what was a pure Macguffin in the story, it does not do what a few simple modifications in the story's ending does to elevate the film. What the conclusion facilitates is the ardent conviction in the fact that each character's internal conversation with God continues through whatever means necessary.

Yudhdham Sei

All of us have faced a conundrum or two in our professional lives. We have at our disposal today a number of tools to dissect and diagnose these problems. The problem of course is that the tools, in and of themselves tend to be distractingly attractive. So seduced are we that some of us tend to utilise these tools to collect way more information than is actually required. And as a consequence we are so mired in data that we lose sight of the problem in all the clutter. Unwittingly we've all contributed to turning the age of information into the age of misinformation. Few directors in the Thamizh film industry have embodied this ethos as well as Mysskin has in his four film old career. His images - through attention to detail, focus on the oddities and unusual framing - leave us with a glut of information that we must expend effort processing what is presented to us. Not for this man, the overexposition of every minor detail through dialog or visuals. His filmmaking is characterized by a stubborn refusal to share information with his audience in a structured manner. This was underlined by a nice moment of irony as I watched Yudhdham Sei this past Saturday. A rather boisterous couple of girls in the adjacent seat were complaining (quite loudly I must add) that they were unable to understand the proceedings. In the scene that followed almost immediately a response appeared, on a postit on JK's wall. "F--k Off" it read. It was impossible for me not to see that note as Mysskin's derision for those who do not have enough patience to see a film through.

While the discerning viewer processes all the information that Mysskin throws at him, there is enough finesse in the scenes and the music to draw him in to proceedings as they were. Consider, for instance, how he chooses to introduce to us the dismembered parts. The first set makes its appearance during a particularly raucous celebration bringing in the new year. Mankind is often at its most selfish when it is happy. When you laugh often the world will laugh with you just to be polite - not because it shares your joy. That no one in that large crowd of revelers chooses to see how a cardboard box of severed body parts reached the roof of a car underlines how unempathetic joy makes us. If the introduction of the first set of body parts is indiction of happiness, the second indicts the viewers themselves. As the ominous background music (Some lovely work with the strings by K here) floats around the walkers and flickering tubelights of a city park we already know that the contents of another cardboard box are waiting to be found. And we are transformed immediately into those perverse voyeurs who rubberneck traffic around a particularly gruesome accident. We want to see one of the walkers discover it and be horrified. Having stolen this from us the first time around Mysskin gives it to us this time, but still holds back the theatrics as if to say "you will get what you want but on my terms".

This is the defining trait of Yudhdham Sei - that the audience must accept the film on Mysskin's terms. At its core it is a police procedural set in a rather dark reality. There are no incentives to be good in this world. In fact one is unsure about what constitutes 'good' in this world. It is a world where a perpetually drunk mortician lies nearly indistinguishable from the cadavers he examines, a borther must serve tea to find his sister and a police officer must bribe his own kind to get information that he should be privy to. To get into any of the plot dynamics would be to alter the terms on which Mysskin wants his viewers entering the cinema hall. And so I shall leave you with a small observation I made during my viewing. Two of my fellow viewers, the same ones who exhibited a disturbing lack of patience during the initial portions of the film, were cheering loudly during some portions in the psychosis fueled violence of the second half. With this portion of the film Mysskin seems to have found that frayed last nerve on which a lot of women are when it comes to the daily inequities they face. I am unsure what was more disturbing, the single minded violence or the cheer it received from some quarters of the aaudience. Are we that pissed off? And if we are what are we doing about it?

Coming home to roost

Film, Satyajit Ray once famously said, is a technological medium of expression developed by the western world. Its time boundedness makes it very difficult to imply that the characters that inhabit it are part of an unending continuum - that the film is but a vignette in the larger expanse that is its reality. Vetrimaaran's Aadukalam attempts, rather overtly, to transcend this limitation. Linguistic and spatial characteristics that are uniquely Madurai form a large part of the first half which, in hindsight, plays out as a preamble for the film Vetrimaaran wanted to make. This portion of the film lies squarely on the shoulder's of Dhanush and he displays a lightness of character that belies this onus. He flits around with great ease as a carefree youngster whose only concern is the rooster he raises and the man who taught him how.  The eco-system that Vetrimaaran constructs for his caharacters is one of rigid hierarchy where each level exercises power over the its inferiors through an exasperating mix of guilt and gratitude. Obvious similarities are drawn between rooster and  master, with both of them depicted as creatures of honed instinct - quick to anticipate and react to external threats but ill equipped to fight the internal conflicts. The film truly begins when the highest level in the hierarchy externalizes its insecurities with disastrous consequences for every level below it.

It isn't often that we see a protagonist expend energy as an unwitting pawn in the internal conflict of another character. We are often too close to what is bad for us. Karuppu is obviously not the sharpest tool in the box. He literally needs to be clubbed on the head with information before he realises who is pulling the strings. In what is the true hallmark of institutionalization Karuppu is not concerned that there are strings. As a puppet he embraces the strings that make him dance. As the second half of the film unfolded I could not resist comparing the films essence with a film that dealt with the issue far more subtly and effectively - Bharatham. The essence of both films lies in the natural resistance to evolution from within the ecosystem and the human inability to deal with it amicably. Now all Vetrimaaran has to do is find some of the subtlety that Sibi and Lohi showed.  

Pithy Hilarity - 7

Me: "The more I think about it the less sense phrases like "more evolved" make. To evolve is to change. To assign a change superiority just because it occurred later does not make sense, especially when the effects of said change can never be evaluated at given point in time."

Him: மூடுறீ !

Sparked by that Reliance commercial...

I am forced to wonder, is कहो ना प्यार है that much harder to write than Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai? I found it so acceptable that a teeny bopper would write words that way that I didn't even question the loss of the indigenous script!

A Theist?

WARNING: Ramblings at the risk of reductionist absurdity.

Maybe I'm a little acrophobic. Or is it all the wind at this elevation? Either way, I am standing on my heel edge at the precipice of a snowclad mountain and I'm a little afraid. Ok, I m very afraid. But there is this strange sense of freedom. A freedom that comes from doing something in spite of the knowledgethat it may cause irreparable body harm. A freedom that comes from the lack of routinely taking the safest bet. The freedom of change - mixing it up a little. Why cant every day bring a new experience?

Maybe I have early onset Alzheimers. Or did it plop out of my ear when I was driving with the top down on the PCH? Man if I dont find that blasted bluetooth head set, its a perfectly well spent 50 quid down the drain. Wait, did it fall in to the drain when I was in the bathroom? What the hell is wrong with me. I know I'm short-term-memory challenged. Why cant I just pick a place and store my phone and receiver there everytime? I'm supposed to be able to stick to a routine.

"Do you believe in the existence of god?". It seems there are only 2 possible answers to this question and all of humanity belongs to one tribe or another depending on their answer (Agnostics are bench players, they dont count). Everyone focuses on the "god" portion of the sentence and forgets that there is someone else in that sentence that is more important, "you". The believer is in a rush to uphold his/her belief and the non-believer is in just as much of a rush to denounce it. But what they both miss is that their answers are conditioned responses. Conditioned to the point of reflex. Reflexes that force us to conform. And in conformity we learn less and less about ourselves. The internal dichotomy, much like the need for both routine and change (do the first 2 idiotic paragraphs make sense now?), is necessary for personal growth.

A wise man once said, and I paraphrase, "That there is a God is a lie. That there isn't a god is an even bigger lie". And yet humanity fights over the answer to a rhetorical question. I would be laughing at the irony, if I weren't depressed beyond belief.