Even as Covid-19 ravages India, paralysing the economy and public life, it has had strange side-effects in some zones: it has stimulated certain aspects of life and sectors of the economy to new trajectories of imagination, and modes of functioning. With physical isolation becoming the norm, people are forced to relinquish many things they had taken for granted—completely foregoing certain comforts, services, journeys, congregations and products—and look for virtual or other alternatives. When the playing fields are thus brutally and inescapably levelled, it is the heavy, monolithic machineries and systems that are the worst affected: used to the rut and unable to adjust and adapt, they are totally immobilised. Their set norms and institutionalised advantages go for a toss. In contrast, systems and modes of functioning that are light, agile and flexible find it easier to survive—even thrive. Covid-19 came as a crisis that provided one such unexpected but positive break for the Malayalam film industry: it created a clean slate of sorts, even an inversion of order where conditions of immobility and isolation turned into an advantage, and smaller structures became more relevant, viable and attractive. In the last one year, when cinema production facilities and exhibition halls across India came to a standstill, Malayalam cinema witnessed an efflorescence of sorts, with several films being made and many of them making it big on OTT platforms, and attracting nation-wide and even global attention. So much so that even the West is ‘discovering’ Malayalam cinema: as is evident in the adulations of a western media that’s otherwise blind to Indian cinema beyond Bollywood. For instance, The Guardian hails it as “the most dynamic of all India’s multiple regional producers”, while The New Yorker describes Joji as “the first major film of the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Time, Space And The Moral Pandemic: The Void Inside Malayalam Cinema's Viral Success
The old macho hero has been killed—it’s cinematic parricide. But the new Malayalam cinema’s ethical horizon has shrunk, with its temporal frame. Only space looms, menacingly.
If we zoom out, one can see that this ability and facility to innovate is not a phenomenon sprung overnight. Several factors—film-industrial, socio-economic and aesthetic—have contributed to it, all providing the edge at a time when big productions with large crews and mega releases became impossible. In terms of the number of films produced, Malayalam has been one of India’s most prolific industries: from an average of around 82 films in 2005-09, it rose to 156 in the next five years, and peaked to 182 in 2015-19. But even when Malayalam accounts for about 9 per cent of the films produced in India, in terms of revenue it accounts for only less than half a per cent! This ‘high-production low-revenue’ paradox is a stark indicator of its low economies of scale, but also one that makes it more nimble, footloose and free in terms of processes and organisation of production, allowing it to navigate crisis situations like the pandemic. Most Malayalam films released through OTT are made with a small crew, in single locations, with minimum facilities. Most importantly, even frontline stars like Fahadh Faasil and Tovino Thomas are ready to cooperate with and participate in these ventures. This is one reason why the Malayalam film industry—small, nimble, flexible—could easily adapt at a time when, elsewhere in India, they were weighed down by huge infrastructure, heavy establishment set-up and too-big stars (institutions unto themselves).
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The physical restrictions on movement and congregation actually triggered thematic innovation too, goading filmmakers into exploring narratives that required minimal crew and logistics. And Malayalam cinema was always vibrant and diverse in its thematics, thanks to several historic and demographic features specific to the region. For instance, when mythological and ‘sant’ films had a significant presence in other cinemas in India during its formative decades, such narratives were marginal in Malayalam: social and secular themes dominated here. This trend held throughout, as is evident in the diversity of locations, social settings and milieus in Malayalam film narratives. It owes partly to Kerala’s eclectic religious demography—Muslims (27 per cent) and Christians (18 per cent) together touch nearly half the population, well-dispersed among Hindu communities across the state, with a significant middle class among all groups. This, coupled with universal literacy, a long and rich cosmopolitan history through maritime trade and colonial incursions—and now a sizeable diaspora across the world—has contributed to the evolution of the modern Malayali mindset. Culturally, this manifests in the long tradition of literary translations, the spread of film society and library movements, and the huge popularity of events such as the Kochi Muziris Biennale, international film and theatre festivals. The local population is, thus, relatively always way more exposed to global trends in arts and ideas. So these new films are not a flash in the pan, but something that emerges out of that Malayali DNA.
A still from Jallikkattu
Analog to Digital, Time to Space
Film-industrial factors too have spurred the emergence of the new cinema. In recent decades, the real estate boom in cities and small towns led to a drastic reduction in the number of single-screen theatres across Kerala—while multiplexes created a new concourse of cinema-goers, the film industry’s revenue model largely shifted from the box office to television rights. TV ratings are based solely on star value, so the control of this new medium over cinema since the mid-1990s strengthened and prolonged the stranglehold of superstars in the industry well into this century. This, in turn, forced narratives to be moulded and rendered to their whims and fancies.
This is where the technological shift from analog to digital made a break. It facilitated the entry of a new, young generation of directors, actors, technicians and scenarists, and finally turned the tide, setting in motion a fresh wave. Inspired by contemporary Korean and Mexican films in their imaging and narrative styles, these films liberated Malayalam cinema from the superstar-centred themes and the upper/middle-class/caste tastes they flaunted and spaces they ruled over. The new films brought characters to the human scale, and shifted the settings to natural landscapes and livelihoods, and themes to the mundane, everyday life, its conflicts, dilemmas and struggles.
This had an intriguing, if profound effect on the conceptual canvas of Malayalam cinema. Macho, superstar narratives can only function in Time. They require a larger temporal horizon: a past to return to, either in nostalgia or to settle scores with, a present in which to wreak revenge and win the woman, a future to dream of and ‘live happily thereafter’. In contrast, the new narratives mostly deal with the contingent: unpredictable events, accidents and chance encounters. The time-horizon shrank to the immediate present. The past of the hero is of no consequence in this do-or-die situation, his future is always indeterminate. Films like Traffic and Chappa Kurishu inaugurated this trend, and we see randomness itself becomes a theme across the new cinema (Halal Love Story, Ishq, S Durga, Ozhivudivasathe Kali, Chola, Jallikkattu, Ee.Ma.Yau, Aabhasam, Randu Per, Joji, Kala, Aarkkariyam, Nayattu). Everywhere, the story unfolds over a short span of time—a day or a few days, or during the course of a journey, a vacation, a get-together. An unforeseen event, say the sudden appearance of an inimical force, upsets the life of the protagonist or a couple, triggering a series of further events. In Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, a chain-snatching on a bus begins a cat-and-mouse game; in S Durga, lovers on the run get into a car at night, and journey into a nightmare; in Ozhivudivasathe Kali and Chola, journeys into the city and the forest set the event horizon; a friends’ reunion in a resort does the job in Lukka Chuppi; in Jallikkattu, a bizarre folk tapestry unfolds when a buffalo runs amuck from a butcher’s shop; in Aarkkariyam, the narrative pivots on a couple’s Covid-time visit to the ancestral home; and Joji is wound tight over a tight span between the patriarch’s fall, parricide and punishment. Everywhere, the plot teeters on the edge in a pressure-cooker situation. Space assumes diabolic dimensions, and time is running out.
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A still from Ee.Ma.Yau
Time is bartered away in an exchange, as it were, with space. Its shrinking is accompanied by an expansion/vitalisation of the spatial dimension. Many of the new Malayalam films are location-centric: the narratives explore mundane spaces, milieus and livelihoods at the margins. ‘Ordinary’ places like Idukki, Kasargod, Angamaly, Kumbalangi and the remote high ranges come alive as a new, viable narrative space—a welcome liberation from the claustrophobic, casteist, upper/middle-class milieus and lifeworlds of the erstwhile narratives. These new narrative spaces are not lyrical or nostalgic, but riddled with deep sexual disquiet, struggles for survival, caste conflicts, and also violence. The shrinking of time and the evacuation of the superstar from the narrative centre together offer more space for space; freed from alpha males who controlled everything, and around whom every other satellite-character revolved, these films recovered ordinary men and women in diverse terrains, milieus and intimate conflict zones. The turn towards spatiality opened up localities, social contexts, diverse lingos and lifestyles at the margins: the stories dealt with spongers, losers, butchers, thieves, birders, small-town photographers, migrant workers…. It’s striking that, though the pandemic severely limited spatial elaborations, space looms as the most dramatic element even in films made during this time. Indeed, space takes on menacing dimensions. The protagonist is often caught in it—entrapped or enticed into it—with a sense of enclosing in dark interiors, forest terrains or dense landscapes. Films like Aarkkariyam, Joji, Kala, The Great Indian Kitchen, Halal Love Story, C U Soon, Iruttu all unfold in a unitary space or in limited locations; the first three are set in rich Christian homesteads surrounded by a sprawling, thickly green estate.
The Emasculated Hero
This is the other common feature of the new films: almost all its protagonists are impotent, castrated or damaged within, very often on the run or psychologically fugitive, and in financial trouble and emotional stress. If the erstwhile superstar heroes took charge of things, won and controlled their women, and ruled over families and destinies, the emasculated hero of these films inhabits a world out of joint, out of control and falling apart. Finding themselves in unpredictable, violent situations, by chance or accident, they only recoil, respond and react. They flee the system (Nayattu), desperately fight off a dangerous foe (Kala), kill a paralysed but domineering father (Joji), or get sucked into colluding with someone’s past crime (Aarkkariyam). The age of tragic or romantic heroes or the veera-nayakas seems to have come to a close. The new heroes do not move in the world with a plan or project, with premeditated acts unfolding in time, they have only desperate, impulsive responses to offer—in the present, within spaces closing in on them. Most noticeably, their impotence is aggravated by the presence of a domineering father figure, before whom they cower and cringe (Aarkkariyam, Joji, Kala, Ayyappanum Koshiyum and many other films). These father figures are, in a subliminal way, nothing but the ghosts of the old masculine superstars—who once lorded over narratives, times and spaces, and even in their moment of eclipse haunt the young, emasculated hero. They, in fact, help frame a deep crisis of masculinity.
The emergence of Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), an organisation formed within the Malayalam film industry after a heinous attack on a female star, deeply resonates here. The WCC may not have had much material impact in terms of wresting better service conditions, fair remuneration or workplace protocols, but it’s a tangible presence in the collective unconscious of the new narrative, its atmosphere of masculine uncertainty and indecisiveness. That air also vibes with a larger politico-economic context beset with unexpected events and unforeseen tragedies at the economic, political, social and even biological levels: like the shock of demonetisation, which upset livelihoods and family budgets; the CAA, which cast a sudden shadow on citizenship itself, creating uncertainties about one’s future; Kerala’s devastating 2018 floods; and now, the ravaging pandemic that has made life a day-to-day affair, with no guarantees about anything or anybody.
The Amoral Space Sans Time
The world of such heroes who do not act as self-driven agents, but only react to outside stimuli—of threat, lust, greed or revenge—is naturally one devoid of any ethical dimension. For, the ethical imagination is deeply temporal, one conceived in the continuum of time, where past wrongs are punished in the present and threaten futures. Devoid of timescales, and fatally hooked to the here and now, there is no time in these narratives for moral self-reflections, ruminations upon guilt, feelings of repentance etc. In such an enclosed, tense and dangerous atmosphere, violence becomes the only mode of reaction and expression. Sans inner ethical conflicts and narrative closures, life is a constant flux and flow in these liquid narratives, one of endless thrills and excitements as they unfold, leaving behind only a feeling of moral void; here, murders can be justified and buried, parricides conspired at and executed, ordinary enmities ended with annihilation.
The sad, flip side of this celebration of the ‘commercial-mainstream NewGen’ film is that some of the most interesting contemporary cinematic works in Malayalam are sidelined and denied the critical attention and acclaim they deserve. For, along with the first crop, an array of independent films too have emerged in the language, made by figures working outside the commercial industry and its styles, genres and themes. Many of them, like Dr Biju, Sanalkumar Sasidharan, Vipin Vijay and Sajin Babu, have also received global acclaim at film festivals abroad. Likewise, promising directors like Sanju Surendran, Don Palathara, Sudevan, Sherry, K.R. Manoj, Geetu Mohandas, Manoj Kana, Santhosh and Sateesh Babusenan have been consistently making films that explore time, space and gender in politically significant, aesthetically challenging and thematically vibrant ways. That such expressions go unnoticed says a lot about mental pandemics and moral blindness of a more severe kind.
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(This appeared in the print edition as "Time Space And The Moral Pandemic")
C.S. Venkiteswaran, National award-winning film critic, documentary filmmaker and professor in Thiruvananthapuram