Sentenced to live
A. SRIVATHSAN
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The recent Tamil film “Naan Kadavul” raises the question about whether suffering can be cinematically represented without becoming an irresponsible gaze.
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This is not a “fairy tale”; it is a film that whips hard at the complacent view of the world that only able bodies inhabit while the rest are ignored, even worse condemned. It is a head-on engagement with the dark subterranean world of mu
ltiple cruelties. The recently released Tamil movie “Naan Kadavul” (I am God), to borrow Schopenhauer’s phrase, is about people who are sentenced to live — something crueller than sentence to death. The depiction of poverty and suffering in this movie makes “Slumdog Millionaire” look like a sugar-filled sweet. This landmark film raises, as well answers, the question whether suffering can be cinematically represented without becoming an irresponsible gaze.
Constant captivity
The story is about the unfortunate lot who are abandoned at different phases of their life: people with deformities, maimed men and women, old and sick, abandoned children and the visually handicapped. Their misery and vulnerability is exploited by ruthless mafias who collect them, kidnap and buy if they have to and force them to beggary. Any expression of indignation and insubordination is dealt brutally. As if the violence in their life was not enough, the slave drivers further mutilate the already mutilated. The crippled beggars cannot escape captivity — of the goons and of life. They are afraid to die and, as long as they fear, as one character in the film says, they need something to eat and someone to feed. When their legs cannot carry them, even a crutch of thorns seems agreeable if it takes to them to food.
The story intersects the lives of the beggars with that of an abandoned son who returns to his village as an aghori — a radical sect that practices meditation sitting on corpses and smears their bodies with the ashes from the funeral pyre. When both meet, death prevails and it dawns for a moment. The aghori not only kills the exploiting villains but also does a mercy killing. To the blind woman who pleads to be relieved of the suffering and exploitation, the aghori plays God.
The film is a journey through an inferno and, as it progress, the ring of cruelties increase and intensify. There are no sugar-coated moments. You may either throw away the popcorn or leave the theatre, but you cannot ignore what is on the screen and the life it depicts. Movies like this remind us that the world we inhabit is not described enough. When films search for the less known and the least represented, it may look vain and self-serving exaggeration. To speak about the less spoken is not exploitation; it is the silence that is. Bala, the director of “Naan Kadavul” is known for his films about protagonists who live at the margins. This time, his enquiry extends and embraces the whole world of those who are much more maligned than the marginalised.
It is often thought that the aesthesis of realism will come to our rescue when we wish to depict poverty and suffering. In such presumptions, real is taken as given. But films including “Nan Kadavul” look at how distinctions between the real and the mythical are blurred. To tell the story of the less known, one tries to go beyond the existing lexicon of images. This does not amount to an exaggeration nor is it manipulative. The movie works hard to show normal is not as normal as we think it to be, but a privileged position. It mounts a serious critique on the notions and constructs about a normal body.
Serious critique
In a disturbing sequence of shots in the beginning, faces and bodies are examined. The physical severance is real and shown in detail. The film dwells on this not in a perverse manner but leverages it to contrast it with the abnormally tall, ideally virile and athletically agile bodies. It locates the less privileged in the subterranean cells and quickly cuts to meander through the temple on the hilltop. The film gallops through a serious of juxtaposition — the chattering beggars and silent aghori, the poor in tatters and the over clothed pilgrims, drudgery of the marginal and drugged intoxication of the cannabis-smoking sadhus.
In the final sequence, the film offers mercy killing as a solution to the blind girl, while the other beggars appear shocked and confused. Should they go for it too? It chides the failed State that has let the dictates of evil rule, but that is not where the provocation lies. By killing the sufferer, the movie frames the question in the ethical realm and not in the political. This is certain to provoke debates and that is where movies such as “Naan Kadavaul”, that are boldly conceived and brilliantly performed, succeed.
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