K.G. George’s cinematic genius and understanding of the female mind

In the hands of a genius like him, stereotypical tropes become sticks to beat patriarchy with

April 07, 2018 04:15 pm | Updated 07:59 pm IST

Malayalam film director, K.G. George, in Kochi.

Malayalam film director, K.G. George, in Kochi.

The idea has lost its novelty, but there was a time when stating it had to come with proof. That a woman could love and hate and have the same virtues and vices as a man rarely found its way into Malayalam cinema. That a woman equalled a man was a revolutionary thought, and any venture into this still nebulous moral universe needed constant reassuring. Given the churn today about the status of women, it is time we paid attention to one of Malayalam cinema’s greatest directors, and its greatest ethicist of man-woman relationships, K.G. George.

He is a nine-time winner of the Kerala State Film Award. His oeuvre is widely cited. In 2016, 10 prominent film critics voted George’s film Irakal as the best original screenplay of all time in Malayalam cinema.

Yet, between notes on technique and craft, and the admiration for a conscientious filmmaker who made ‘good’ films, there lies the neglected heart of his art: his empathy for women. Almost all his key protagonists were women; their stories were tragic and poetic, but never were they the defeatist epitaphs of women seen in other Malayalam films.

Take Ee Kanni Koodi , a crime thriller in which police officer Ravindran follows the mysterious death of a prominent sex worker named Susan. As a young Christian woman, she had abandoned her family to be with her lover, Harshan. A self-taught painter who grew up in an orphanage, the bespectacled and melancholic Harshan is Susan’s promise of independence and love. Her trust and Harshan’s self-confidence pay off when he is contracted to provide artworks to the offices of a wealthy financier, and it seems good times are ahead. But Harshan has taken to drink, the couple has sunk into insurmountable debt, and, like the terrible fates that sometimes befall cinematic geniuses, he dies on a rail track and orphans his wife and child. Abandoned by her family and then her lover, Susan becomes a sex worker to raise her son.

Rational gaze

George’s camera is rational, like the police officer’s gaze. The wide shots establish emotional distance: the sex worker’s fate is but a consequence of circumstance, they seem to say. But quietly, an empathy for the woman breaches us. This smuggling is done through a scene where officer Ravindran visits Susan’s parents to tell them of their daughter’s death. At first, the officer is rebuffed. His attempts to persuade the father to claim the daughter’s body are met with outrage, a trope in Malayalam films that usually follows a teary-eyed monologue by the parents to condemn the wayward woman. “Bury her anywhere you like,” the father says sorrowfully.

However, in what is a stunning deliverance of the woman, Ravindran ignores the sentimental father and tells him to ask the mother if she wants to see her daughter’s body. He tells them the protocol for the state-assisted funeral and walks off.

There is a quiet consecration of the tragic woman’s life before the camera performs her last rites, something perhaps no more profoundly felt than in Mattoral . If George’s women battle jealous, self-indulgent and exploitative men in his other films, in Mattoral they battle a more formidable enemy, the ideal husband — the decent man or the bore. In Mattoral, he is an upright bureaucrat; when he takes his family out, he walks ahead and his wife follows. He gave up drinking — the two pegs he ever had with an ‘ex-military man’ — for his marriage.

Kaimal is the proprietor of the spotless shirt and reputation. Locked in a loveless marriage with this sinless man, Susheela abandons Kaimal and her children to live with a mechanic, Giri. But the suave and sweet-talking Giri apportions his affections to too many, and Susheela is left feeling empty again. The repentant wife returns, only to find that her husband has stabbed himself in the heart. We find that Kaimal is an egocentric man, and possesses also a streak of vengeful self-harm.

A still from Yavanika.

A still from Yavanika.

Though George affords Kaimal some sympathy, he refuses to romanticise his self-pity, as other Malayalam films might have done. Instead, he firmly indicts the man’s chauvinism for the crushing monotony his wife experiences. Certainly, her decision to abandon him was a thoughtless act, but we never fail to notice that hers is the natural wager of a desperate person. In a world where women still struggle to give expression to the many formless torments they face every day, Kaimal the bore is the masterful skinning of patriarchy’s complacency. With him, George shows, with his characteristic dark humour and Dostoevskian density of detail, how most men fail women in their relationships.

Quit loafing

In Mela , likely guided by the same wicked humour, there is a jealous man who is a dwarf. In Adaminte Variyellu, a woman who goes mad from the drudgery in her husband’s home is seemingly possessed by her father-in-law’s ghost. Seated on the long armchair that had been her husband’s father’s, she yells orders to her mother-in-law to cook dinner and run a hot bath. When a concerned mother-in-law calls for her son, who arrives still drunk, the wife commands him to quit loafing, much to his puzzlement, given that he had beaten and kicked her before and she had accepted it stoically.

In many Malayalam films, madness is the foregone conclusion for women who break the norm; the vulture watching every woman who dares. More importantly, the mad woman is that wrinkle in society’s conscience that slowly irons itself out, the same way her histrionics slowly ebb from our screen. It’s merely the convalescence of the normal, and there can be no justice: how can a mad woman fight her case? The mad woman of AdaminteVariyellu , however, is no cautionary tale. For even as she has gone mad, a part of her stares accusingly at her perpetrators, recalling their crimes:

‘Gauri, make some good rasam!’

‘Gopi, go see Menon about that piece of land he is selling!’

In the hands of a genius like George, madness becomes a stick to beat patriarchy with. The humour of George’s frames seem to remind us that we should remember to laugh, that our radical thoughts need not shock others. By being able to laugh at them, George seems to take us closer to the hearts of his characters. We may speculate that this may have been his cinematic purpose — to make us laugh at it all — but we can have no doubt that he also wanted our undivided attention on his cinema.

As is ‘announced’ on a stage at the beginning of his magnum opus Yavanika , by a theatre troupe manager: ‘If you miss even a word of this play, you will not understand the complex ties of man to woman that are unravelled here.’

But despite that warning many years ago, George’s heart-warming friendship with women on celluloid, the poetics of several of his films, has remained a severely underappreciated aspect of Malayalam cinema.

An editor with HarperCollins India, the writer makes a living worrying about books.

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