One of the pleasures afforded to us in this era of interconnectivity is encountering works of art that are obviously formally inventive and brilliantly made but completely incomprehensible. Nampakal Nerathu Mayekkan, a film directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery, a filmmaker working in Malayalam and Tamil (both language groups in India), is probably enigmatic and difficult even for its target audience, that is, people who speak those languages. But the film's challenges, of course, are amplified for a viewer such as myself -- I'm able to recognize the esthetic qualities of the film, it's peculiar and entrancing mood that is comical, poetic, and dreamlike, as well as the commitment and effectiveness of the acting; but I can't really understand what the movie is about and, after reading some reviews, discover, to my pleasure, that I misconstrued most of what I saw. In instances like this, it's wonderful to learn about the depths of one's ignorance -- this recognition is an incentive to learn more, to study, to approach, at least, modes of human consciousness that are recognizably coherent and meaningful, but completely foreign. There are various modes of difficulty that artworks pose -- some films and poems and novels are designed to be rebarbative, that is, they repel and make the viewer (or reader) feel alienated from the experience offered; this kind of art, often intricately allusive and impermeable, has its pleasures, but, all too often, the work seems designed to make its audience feel inferior. (I am thinking of some of Antonioni's movies, poetry like Pound's Cantos, Gaddis' late novels, paintings by Cy Twombly, to name a few examples.) There's always pleasure to be derived from decoding an intricate work and solving its puzzles -- but this pleasure has a competitive edge: the artist sets riddles that the viewer or reader is supposed to solve. It's a sort of power-transaction. Nampakal offers a more profound experience -- I don't think the film is intended to be difficult to decipher, although, of course, it's ultimate meanings are elusive; Pellissery is a popular filmmaker in India and the picture stars an actor named Mammootty (who produced the picture), an Indian actor equivalent to John Wayne or Robert Redford -- a Muslim, Wikipedia tells me that he's known "mononymously by the hypochorism, Mammootty, meaning, I guess, that's he known by a single "pet" name. The problems posed by Nampakal are cultural, arising from an encounter with a sensibility that is completely different from what we are accustomed to. Figuring out an allusion to Archilochus in a painting by Twombly is fun enough, but, perhaps, to some degree a trivial pursuit. But there are many millions of Tamil and Malayalam speakers and, of course, they have a rich and ancient culture and, so, I think that there's a more profound pleasure in opening the door to those traditions just a crack and peeping inside -- as Howard Carter said when he shined his torch into King Tut's tomb: "wonderful things," he said, "wonderful things inside." I don't make any claim that watching Nampakal, even with some annotations, provides me with any basis to make much in the way of judgement on the movie. But there's a rich aspect to the film that persuades me that it's meanings are inexhaustible when considered in their proper context and that, ultimately, the picture affords a glimpse into a cosmos that is wonderful but wholly unfamiliar to me. In one Indian review, a commentator says "the goosebump moment for me was when Malayli James puts aside his mundu for Tamilian Sundaram's lungi." Someone else comments: "Not a wannabe ulagi cinema." I have literally no idea what this means. There is a great review of the film by Anupana Chopra, a female Hindi-speaking critic (although she presents her opinions in the lingua franca of the Subcontinent, English). She's very intelligent and has many helpful insights into the movie, but, even, she is baffled by some aspects of Nampakal, admitting that aspects of the film are culturally remote from her.
A thumbnail sketch of the film's plot, as I perceived it on my first uninitiated viewing is this: an ill-assorted group of people board a bus to travel somewhere. Many of them seem to be related. The group's leader is a hirsute, irritable guy named James (Mammootty). The bus is warm and the trip dull -- the people sing with one another for awhile (this irritates James) and watch TV. The bus-driver, a harried fellow who is bullied by James, warns that they are driving through some villages and that he must be vigilant to avoid a "head on crash." In the country, flat and baking in the mid-day heat, all the bus passengers fall asleep. Suddenly, James awakens and orders the driver to stop. Toilet facilities are few and far between and the others think that James intends to go to the bathroom on the side of the road. Instead, he charges through a field of dusty-looking yellowish-green crops and enters a small rural village. He acts as if he owns the place alarming the natives. The town is small, not exactly impoverished but humble -- it's also a clean, colorful cubist assembly of stucco walls and elegant brightly painted, if bare. interiors. James enters a house where he berates a woman whom he calls his wife -- why isn't there any around to eat. He talks to an old blind woman who has her face turned to a TV set -- he calls her mother. His "father" is lying flat on his back on a sort of shelf in the house. The place is still, sunstruck. Another woman is spackling the side of a house with cow dung patties -- I don't know why, The villagers are upset by James but start calling him Sundaram. James/Sundaram steals a motor-bike and putts around the neighborhood with the locals in not-so-hot pursuit. Meanwhile, the people from the bus have made their way to the village seeking James -- they want to be on their way. James confronts the townspeople saying that he belongs in the village. They don't seem to know what he means. Night falls and the travelers have to spend the evening in the village. (For some reason, they are unable to leave the village without retrieving James -- this may be a testament to James' importance as the leader of the tourist group or may be some form of surrealism: the movie has aspects similar to Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, everyone seems paralyzed and no one can leave the town. In the morning, James/Sundaram delivers milk on a route that seems familiar to him -- this baffles the regular milkman. (Later, in a scene reminiscent of Tarkovsky, we see the milk flooding a drainage ditch, gradually clouding the water -- James/Sundaram has poured the milk into the water.) The townspeople plot to poison James with sedatives in his food; the tourists, similarly, plan to inject him with sedative and drag him to the bus. James/Sundaram drives the motorbike to a local bank (it seems) and withdraws money "from the association" signing as Sundaram. He returns to the village to his mother, father, wife and daughter. Everyone falls asleep. James/Sundaram wakes up and announces that it's time to go and everyone marches back to the bus. The uncanny trance has lifted. The bus chugs down the road and we see, for the first time, writing on the display on the front of the vehicle telling us that the tourists are members of a theater group -- this explains some references to Shakespeare in the dialogue, comments about sleep and dream and the fact that "all the world is a stage" on which we are destined to play our parts.
The film is elegantly shot, almost entirely eschewing close-ups. The director brilliantly establishes space and location. The opening sequences in a roadside motel are shot down a long corridor with a drinking fountain (in which people perform their morning ablutions) at the side of the frame. The camera never moves and the takes are generally one or two minutes long, allowing the viewer to inspect the images for clues as to what is going on. The only exception is a montage early in the film showing religious imagery -- almost all of it Christian. Each shot is beautifully composed, with fields of bright saturated color often dividing the frame -- in one sequence near the end of the film, the pictorial field is literally divided between deep blue and gory-looking red: James/Sudaram dominates one side of the composition and someone from the bus is on the other side -- it seems to be a sort of nighttime celebration. I counted four close-ups. The most important is when James goes to a barber and plans to get a shave. When he sees himself in the mirror, he is shocked and begins to weep. The camera then shows us framed picture of another man on the wall. Another indelible shot, moving for reasons that I can't quite identify, shows the blind woman in close-up seeming to look at the camera. The film's soundtrack, apart from interactions of the characters, consists entirely of chatter from off-screen TV sets poised over the corners of the rooms. Everyone seems to be watching TV continuously, shows that appear to be lurid melodramas with intrusive musical cues and lots of histrionic dialogue. Whether this is part of the hallucination or just an instance of realism about life in a small Indian village isn't clear to me. It's obvious that the continuous dialogue broadcast from the TV shows comments on the action but I wasn't able to exactly decipher why or how the colloquies on the TV connect with what we are seeing -- this is an important aspect for the film's target audience, many of whom identify what they call "goosebump" moments in which the television dialogue comments on the action occurring on-screen. This layering to the soundtrack poses tremendous problems for a viewer who is struggling to keep up with very fast and intricate subtitles. The movie is gorgeous and the portrait of the bus, stranded at the roadside as a cube of glowing light, is remarkable. The scenes in the bus are redolent of heat and humidity and drowsiness; you can almost smell the bodies in the bus. The little town is as well-characterized and coherently depicted as the similar village in Abbas Kiastorami's The Wind will Carry Us -- a film that raises similar questions about the interactions between urban and rural people under the aegis of a village with ancient (even timeless) customs. There's a dog named Sevile who wanders around and herds of goats -- sometimes, James/Sudaram stoops over to pet the dog and the animal seems to know him. The film's style is similar to the great films by Chaitanya Tamhane Court and The Disciple.
So with the benefit of reading several reviews and watching Chopra's video clip here is what I now know about the film. The people on the bus and led by James are Malayalam Christians who have spent the weekend at a pilgrimage site. (They are also apparently members of a theater company.) The bus is going to someplace called Kerala. James and his friends despise the Tamil cuisine that they are offered as the bus tour takes a break at a roadside cafe. (We see the women queued up to use a noisome toilet; the man are just relieving themselves outdoors.) As the tour bus continues through the Tamil countryside everyone falls asleep. Sleep is the brother of death and there are allusions to reincarnation in what next occurs. James wakes up and stops the bus suddenly speaking Tamil (There is no way that even a Hindi-speaking Indian would know this -- the crucial language shift in the film is something that you have to be told.) James goes into town and assumes the identity of someone named Sundaram who has been missing for two years -- there's some suggestions about immigration to work in Qatar. But everyone believes Sundaram, who was seemingly the town's milkman, is dead. That's why the townspeople are baffled when James claims to be Sundaram and says that he knows them all, addressing them by their names. In the barber shop scene, Sundaram sees in the mirror that he's inhabiting the body of James something that shocks and horrifies him. The man in the picture on the wall is the missing Sundaram. There's a Rip van Winkle aspect to the movie: Sundaram is amazed that a temple (it looks like wedding cake confection) is now finished in its compound near the town -- apparently, it was incomplete when he left the village and vanished. Similarly, he learns that people with whom he was friends have died.
The movie seems to have something to do with Tamil - Malayalam cultural differences and the relationship between the two groups; Hindi and Punjabi speakers mention the "narcissism of slight differences" in this context although, I suppose, this may reflect a cultural prejudice as well. I have no real idea what the movie is supposed to mean but it's a beguiling vision constructed with remarkable elegance, reticence, tact, and beauty.
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