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INTENSE MOMENTS Naalu Pennungal achieves a brilliant unified experience and yet keeps them apart

Adoor’s association with films is of a time when he wasn’t a filmmaker yet. He established Chithralekha Film Society and the Chalachithra Sahakara Sangam, the first film society in Kerala which aimed at production, distribution and exhibition of films in the co-operative sector. In a career spanning over 35 years, Adoor has made 10 films and almost 30 documentaries, many of which have won awards in the national and international circuit. He was in Bangalore to participate in the inauguration of the Second Bengalooru International Film Festival. His film “Naalu Pennungal” was the inaugural film of the Indian Panorama section. Adoor is hardly the kind of filmmaker who makes films in quick succession. Ask him why he has made only ten films and he will tell you that he believes in working them out in detail. Adoor delves deep into his subject, spends enormous lengths of time on research, rendering his films multilayered and complex. The intense social being that he is, Adoor has a complete grasp of the world as it is around him. And therefore, you find him not just conversant about filmmaking, but also about politics, literature, culture and music. His films, one must concede, are therefore an expression of his multiple understanding, agree or disagree you may with them.

While Adoor has his loyalists, he’s also been the centre of controversies. His films “Mukhamukham”, “Elipathayam” (which discuss the degeneration of Left politics) and “Vidheyan” (he came under severe criticism and was accused of swinging towards the Right), you could well agree with the director when he says that they were manifestations of his own personal obscurities. “Politicians never read in between the lines. They ask only one thing: ‘Is it for or against us’. But it was neither. I was neither eulogizing nor condemning. It was a mere probing. How do you explain that to them?” asks Adoor, rhetorically. As a filmmaker, Adoor doesn’t believe in making issue-based films. “You should leave it to a filmmaker what he wants to do in his film. Aren’t immediate issues to be dealt by newspapers and television? You should not wait for a filmmaker to write a script, find a producer, a distributor, make his film and start a revolution.” A good film has to survive the period of its making, explains Adoor. “A film is made in its time and not for its time. I am of the belief that films shouldn’t age. It should outlive the filmmaker and remain contemporary,” he says.

Adoor emphasises that awareness of an issue is only the starting point, whereas films should influence the thought. “It should make you ask questions about yourself and the society.” However, when a filmmaker raises questions the film is dubbed as “art”. Even mainstream filmmakers, who want to earn their share of respectability, now straddle both worlds. You often hear them saying, ‘It’s not entirely commercial’. Is it time then to reformulate our notions of “popular” and “art”? “There is no compromise. You either decide to sell your soul or not. It can’t be part commercial and part art. The best of cinema is made out of conviction. It is an act of belief.” While Adoor has a problem with those who use the label to their advantage, he also says how in India, the label ‘art’ in cinema has become a derogatory word. “People have come to think that it is something one needs to avoid. The media I think is also responsible for it,” he says sharply.

If there is another issue that leaves Adoor irate is these categories of “national” and “regional”. “There is a danger in this categorisation. It is popular perception that Hindi cinema is national cinema. Not even Hindi parallel cinema fits into this category. If we term Bollywood as national, it is tragic. What could be termed as national or Indian cinema is the work of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and their like in several Indian languages including English.”

Even with all these aching discriminations and emphatic observations, Adoor, with undiminished enthusiasm, continues to make films guided by principle. “Naalu Pennungal”, based on Thakazhi Sivashankara Pillai’s short stories, took more than a year for Adoor to make, like most of his other films. By his own admission, it took him nearly five months to read up all of the writer’s works, yet again, before he embarked on the project. The film, brilliantly made with a fine narrative, is the juxtaposition of four short stories about four women, belonging to different classes. “They also operate at different levels of consciousness, so there is a definite growth in them. As the film progresses, it moves towards a point of resolution. So there is progression, both in terms of time and theme,” he explains.

The placement of the stories in the narrative – The prostitute, The virgin, The housewife and The spinster – at once bring to fore, with sensitivity and objectivity, of how in the mind’s realm and in lived life, one role merges into being the other. He achieves a brilliant unified experience and yet keeps them apart. However, one wonders, why the women are trapped in their conformist positions, even as they call to grow beyond it? As you watch the film there is this compelling feeling of the story trying to break free of its defined self, the set boundaries. Does the auteur then, in some sense assume the passive wisdom of a reader, bound as he is by notions of morality that undermines the complex nature of human relationships?

But the kind of reviews this powerful tale with a striking narrative has been getting, it is evident that Adoor’s audiences are happy that his film is not “complex” and doesn’t expect of them any socio-political preparation.

However, I’m yet to get answers.

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