Not all classics are bound to be loved unanimously. Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron hardly strikes me as a great one for laughs. And Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is as romantic to me a molar surgery.
Three recent films, all in the limelight for different reasons, left me…if not cold, then tepid.
Kamal K M’s Malayalam film Pada has come into a cornucopia of renown for its recreation of a real-life political incident where four men in the Palakkad district of Kerala held the District Collector hostage in 1996. They were protesting for the right of tribals to their forest land.
There were other films that have similarly visited the rights of tribals to their natural habitat in the forest. In Ganesh Vinayakan's Tamil film Thaen a beekeeper Velu (Tharun) leading an idyllic existence with his wife and daughter, suddenly finds his existence turned upside down when his wife falls ill: the herbal medicines just won’t do. She needs to be taken to the city for a cure.
The haunting film shows the innocent little family’s trauma in the heartless city as a metaphor of savage deforestation. Vetrimaaran’s Asuran (2019), TG Gnanavel’s Jai Bhim (2021) and Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021) are some other recent Tamil films that hurled hard-hitting drama on the theme of tribal/Dalit’s land usurpation.
In Kamal K.M’s Pada we feel none of the tribals’ trauma. The suffering is marginalised to a distant diatribe. What we see is the PROTEST for the Adivasis’ suffering which to me seems like missing the trees for the forest. What the film lacks is not focus but history. We understand that the writer-director wants to concentrate his creative energies on the struggle rather than the suffering. In this endeavour, the narrative ends up seeming like any hostage drama, like Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon where Al Pacino holds up a bank to pay for his partner’s sex-change operation.
In Pada, the four rebels with a cause, played with effective intensity by Kunchacko Boban, Joju George, Vinayakan, and Dileesh Pothan walk into the collectorate and hold the collector hostage with such ease, it is almost as if these tribal protestors were trained for the event by professionals.
There is no tentativeness in their attitude. The quartet behaves like professional gunmen but seem averse to actually perpetuating any violence. This makes their act of rebellion and protest seem very ineffective. No real change in societal mindsets is possible without bloodshed. So the real rebel believe.
Pada for all its genuine intentions of bringing to light the sufferings of the tribals just doesn’t rise above its hostage-thriller ambitions. The actors, though excellent on the crime scene are required to play incomplete characters. They seem unsure of their actions. One of the hostage takers (Joju George, utterly natural as usual ) is shown helping an elderly couple at the Collectorate with pension papers.
The perpetrators are not bad people. The administration is reasonable. So who is the villain here?
The women are characters are dealt with breezily in the plot. A very fine actress like Kani Kusruti is just a shadowy suffering wife to one of the rebels. While the men do the heavy lifting the women look after the children and wait for their men-folk to come home safe. One of the wives (played by Unimaya Prasad) joins in the hostage planning. But is soon shooed away by her husband.
Patriarchy follows the rebels to their dead end plans in Pada. There are no sides for the audience to choose from in this indeterminate drama. And that is not a good sign in a film that aspires to be a fable on the Feeble versus the Able.
Deepesh Thacholi’s interminably delayed Malayalam film Aquarium which was earlier entitled Pithavinum Putranum, lay in the cans since 2012. It was denied a censor certificate on several occasions. And just when it was ready to release last month, the Kerala High Court imposed a two-week stay-order on the controversial film arguing that it could offend the sentiments of the Catholic community.
Director Deepesh, who is also a school teacher, is no rabble-rouser. He wants to humanise convent Catholicism by showing the priests and nuns with frailties and weaknesses. To that extent, Aquarium is revolutionary, with no parallel to its probing of a sacred institution in cinema of any Indian language.
Having said that, by mere singularity, the film cannot achieve greatness. There are many blind spots in director Deepesh’s demystification of the Church. The relationships are at the most, cursorily developed. The actors are competent. But they seem unsure after a point as to where the director is taking them.
The lovely Honey Rose who plays the lead can clearly be seen wearing makeup when she is not meant to be.
The film finally out on the Saina Play OTT platform, is a prurient oddity at the most. Not that it has any graphic sexual images. For those interested in watching nuns in forbidden postures, there is Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta which has so many images of graphic intimacy I wonder what the Catholic church in India would have had to say about it were it to be released in India(it won’t).
Aquarium bears some striking thematic resemblances to Benedetta. In both, a rebellious nun arrives at the convent to shake up the status quo. In both the sexually alert nun is “tamed” by force through a process that seems to be genital mutilation.
The difference between the two films is in the voyeuristic posturing of Benedetta as opposed to the cavort coyness of Aquarium. The two actresses playing the protagonists, nuns Sister Elsitta (Honey Rose with the disarming beatific smile) and the mutinous Sister Jaseentha (Rajshri Ponappa) again parallel the two nuns from Benedetta who go their separate ways in pursuit of self-gratification.
Elsitta dedicates her desires to the love of Jesus Christ and even has visions of him in her room when she is imprisoned by the church for crossing the Biblical line (a close parallel to this in Hinduism would be Meerabai’s devotion to Lord Krishna). Jaseentha is the rebel. She wants to experience every earthly pleasure. She pays a heavy price for her non-conformity.
The scenes of sexual violation in the convent are shot as a shadowplay with the leery priest unleashing sickening primaeval violence on the whimpering nuns. The priest doesn’t want the sex to be pleasurable in any way for the nuns that he violates. There is no voyeuristic pleasure in the sex here. And I think that’s what Deepesh wanted. His frames are laden with symbolism. The shots are almost always in the dark.
Aquarium is offensive only if you believe that there are no malpractices, no sexual misconduct in places of worship. Otherwise this stark film, not much of a groundbreaker as far as cinematic excellence is concerned, just shows us what we all know. That even priests and nuns have physical desires.
Go ahead, gasp, as much as you like. In the depiction of the sexual repression in a convent (time-frame unspecified, therefore hard to tell which era the Convent embraces since convents don’t have cellphones and treadmills anyway) Deepesh’s film is a head-turner. But as far as being Good Cinema is concerned Aquarium falls way short.
Pedro Almodovar's Parallel Mothers is the Spanish director’s most disappointing film in recent times. Penelope Cruz is a very attractive woman. Evidently, the Spanish king of surreal Pedro Almodovar seems to think so. He has directed Ms Cruz in six other films. The 7th is probably the least satisfying. A mishmash of lineage explorations and wildly improbable soap-opera styled coincidences Parallel Mothers left me bored, exasperated and finally hugely disappointed. What on earth are the critics raving about?! The film is a travesty, a mockery of all that the director-actress duo has achieved earlier, especially in Volver which was vivacious canny and compelling.
Parallel Mothers is way too enamoured of its serious campy-ness. Almodovar flirts with the most fatuous improbabilities and coincidences. Even then the film would have been an oddball experiment with whimsical themes if the director, hellbent on cramming the narrative with history and melodrama, had not force-fed the Spanish Civil War into the lurching heaving plot (you know that feeling with your face on the toilet bowl?).
The film feels unreal (and not in a good way) from the start. Janis (Penelope Cruz) has crazy afternoon sex with anthropologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde) whom everyone describes as wildly handsome, sexy etc. But that must be on paper only. Arturo here had me wondering why a woman as attractive and successful as Janis would waste her time on something so banal. (Come to think of it I felt the same way about the film). She is soon pregnant with his child.
In case you think this film is about Janis’s relationship with Arturo then think again. The film is about the two mothers played by Penelope Cruz and the waif-like Milena Smit who bond during birth. Their babies get swapped. Soon the sacrificial sobbings kick into the womb view with both the ladies lurching into the maternity mode with valid birthrights and pallid emotions.
Very soon one of the babies is ‘cot’ napping while the two beautiful mothers make love on the crinkly carpet .
The plot coils and uncoils with horrendous strenuousness. Almodovar is clearly not interested in investing in the mother-daughter dynamics beyond a point, although there are three pairs of mothers daughters trying to find a steady place to anchor their feelings. Nothing works in this dead end drama of dogged dispassion. The plot is cluttered with scenic nullity. Beautiful shots of Madrid cafes and the Spanish countryside do not take away from the sense of sterility that swamps the characters’ desperate emotions.
I wish the plot had focused on the two young reluctant mothers and how they learnt to be good mothers rather than on how to be good lovers. In the end, a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War is excavated. One of the two babies is dead and the audience is dismayed by the fogginess of Pedro Almodovar’s vision, although no one is saying it out aloud. Fugitive Motherhood was more exciting in Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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