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Adoor’s new film focuses on women

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: When Adoor Gopalakrishnan makes a film focusing on women, it cannot but only be news. For, critics the world over who have been following him closely would tell you that his films are centred on men caught in a world of crumbling structures and ideologies.

Women are there mostly to reflect the existential dilemmas of his male protagonists, without any inner life of their own.

What would, perhaps, mark out his latest work, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), reaching cinemas on November 2, is that it is focussed on women, four of them, each trapped in stations and situations in life that call for tremendous amount of endurance and resistance.

“These four women are distanced from one another in time. Their professions are different. Each of them belongs to different strata of society in terms of class, as also consciousness.

“All the same, there develops through these four stories a thematic conflict that finds resolution at the end,” says Adoor about the quartet of tales that profiles the domestic and sexual dilemmas that women in subservient positions endure. The film is placed in the two decades between 1940 and 1960, but its resonance for the contemporary times looks unmistakable.

Based on four stories by the celebrated Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Adoor’s Naalu Pennungal is an exploratory journey through the lives and minds of the four women, each an archetype: the prostitute, the virgin, the housewife and the spinster.

They took birth from Thakazhi’s four stories — Oru Niyamalamghanathinte Katha; Kanyaka; Chinnammuvamma; and Nithyakanyaka — to which he turned to when Doordarshan approached him to make a programme based on Thakazhi’s works.

Adoor says he zeroed in on these four stories after reading up most of Thakazhi’s nearly 400 stories.

Having found in these stories excellent starting points for his cinematic exploration, he introduced new characters, situations and sub-texts into the narrative of Naalu Pennungal, moving his women, each one caught in social mores and codes of her times, from passive acceptance to willed choices.

All the four stories have the same musical score with subtle variations, done by Isaac Thomas, which lends thematic cohesion to the film.

The 105-minute film has Padmapriya as the prostitute, Geetu Mohandas as the virgin, Manju Pillai as the housewife and Nandita Das as the spinster.

Along with them come Kavya Madhavan, Murali, Mukesh, KPAC Lalitha, Manoj K. Jayan, Sona Nair and Asokan and others.

M.J. Radhakrishnan has wielded the camera, N. Harikumar has done the sound recording and Ajithkumar the editing for Naalu Pennungal, which is being featured in this year’s London Film Festival and was shown at the Toronto Film Festival as one of the new works from world’s master filmmakers.

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