They were women you could not easily forget. Women who came in all shades – from teenagers to grandmothers, from villages to megalopolis, from suburban towns to cosmopolitan landscapes. They were sex workers, doctors, college girls, homemakers, workers in factories, farmers and labourers, mothers and lovers, in and out of wedlock. Such was the wide canvas of his films that I.V. Sasi scanned a formidable spectrum of femininities to instil his frames with a burning energy, intelligence and passion.
Freer body language
The iconic poster of Avalude Ravukal (1978) reveals a girl’s close communion with her own body regardless of who is gazing at her. Sasi took the lid off adolescent sexuality, exposing the vulnerability and insecurities of a society trying to run away from its own instincts. His women were wilful, intense and stubborn, fiercely possessive, selfish and vindictive, disarmingly selfless, maternal, under full control of themselves and totally helpless on another level. In combination with some brilliant scriptwriters like T. Damodaran, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Alleppey Sheriff, P. Padmarajan, Ranjith Balakrishnan and many others Sasi’s films explored the conflicts and contradictions of women’s worlds through seasoned actresses like Srividya, Sarada, Sheela and Jayabharathi.
Through his lens Seema grew into a powerful movie presence as an actress of admirable calibre, energy and verve. Through her this director was able to imagine women of extraordinary bravado and of gutsy girls with a sense of adventure. Seema’s oeuvre showed amazing range as she matured into some of her finest histrionic moments in Aksharangal (1984), Anubandham (1985), Kaanamarayathu (1985), Aalkoottathil Thaniye (1984), and Innallenkil Naale (1982). Sasi’s heroines broke the barriers of dress codes with miniskirts, bell bottoms and sleeveless t shirts. A different, freer female body language was being imagined through actors like Sreedevi and Seema.
Women held their own in the tempestuous spaces of man-woman relationships as emoted by Aswathi in Vaadakakkoru Hridayam (1978), Lakshmi, the nurse in Ezhamkadalinakkare (1979), Susheela in Innallenkil Naale and Bhanumathi in Devasuram (1993). A graphic memory from Ezhamkadalinakkare (the first Malayalam film to be shot in the US and perhaps the first to engage with a Malayali diasporic community) is a naive Seetha (enacted by Seema) ogling at a young white couple smooching away in a public park, oblivious to the world around. Sasi was quick to drop hints of cultural differences in man woman intimacy, though as a humorous aside. More haunting is the memory of a harassed college girl running through the corridors to avoid a predatory gang and jumping to her own death in Ee Naadu (1982). It still disturbs to see a daughter brokenly telling her father that her sister has become a woman (I nnallenkil Naale), heightening the vulnerability of the family.
Women on his screen listened to their own bodies, to the messages tingling along their limbs. Through them, Sasi defied stereotypes, prodding the Malayali cine-goer to confront herself; and look into the thousand repressions and frustrations the flesh is heir to.
His films opened up a veritable Pandora's box of bold and uninhibited expressions of female desire thereby mercilessly critiquing the double standards and hypocrisies of middle class morality. His forays into the forbidden areas of sexuality and an aesthetic recognition of the subversive power of sensuality made the domestic space a place of turmoil, which enabled the women actors to take their versatility and artistic potential to a different level of performance. Because, this director was sensitive to many a Bhanumathi “yearning for small measures of victories” in their own ways.
The writer is a faculty member in the Department of English,University of Calicut. She writes on gender and cinema.
