In 2017, Lijo Jose Pellissery directed the Malayalam language film Jallikattu. The movie was dubbed into another southwestern Indian language, Kannada, in 2021. Pellissery, who is an important director, works primarily in Malayalam, a language spoken along the southwest coast of Indian; he is also fluent in Tamil, another language spoken in that vicinity as witness his most recent movie Nanpakal Nerathus Mayakkam, a 2023 release on Netflix. Amazon Prime offers Jallikattu to subscribers to the cable service although only in the Kannada version; this is unfortunate because the subtitles for the film as released in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken inland to the east of the Malayalam and Tamil-speaking coast, are awful -- non-grammatical, often displayed too quickly for comprehension, and full of bizarre locutions: do people in southwestern India rally eat "pork mutton" or "beef mutton" (the word "mutton" seems to be a general term for "meat")? The Kannada-subtitled film, called Bhakshakkaru in that language, is Pellissery's 2017 movie, seemingly complete and unedited. But it also has some peculiar features. Any time a character drinks alcohol or smokes a cigarette (and Pellissery's hoodlums are always guzzling some clear liquor that looks like vodka and chainsmoking), a ribbon-shaped advisory pops up on the screen, yellow with red letters and some pictograms with a martini glass and pack of cigarettes shown cancelled by a line -- as far as I can determine, the inserts, appearing in about half the shots in the movie, warn viewers against using alcohol and tobacco. The device is off-putting because the advisory flashes in scenes packed with characters in which the actual person smoking or drinking is well-nigh invisible. So, in addition, to laboring mightily to read the incoherent and, often, nonsensical, subtitles, the viewer finds himself trapped in a game of "find the smoker" or "booze-hound", an exercise that is fun in a sort of perverse way, but also distracting.
I'll call Pellissery's film Jallikattu since this is how it is more often identified. Jallikattu is so astonishing visually, and so bizarre and compelling thematically, that I was willing overlook the horrible subtitling and the invasive admonitions about nicotine and booze. Pellissery is one of the best new filmmakers and the three pictures of his that I have seen are thrilling and spectacular. So I recommend seeking out this picture on Amazon and giving it a try. The milieu is incredibly exotic and Jallikattu, although thematically insane, is remarkable and as exciting as something like the Bourne movies or Mission Impossible. I'm not certain that I understand Jallikattu, although in a way it is more compact and accessible (since it channels Hollywood action movies) than Pellissery's magnum opus The Angamaly Diaries, an elaborate and fantastically complex gangster movie that imitates Scorsese or the ineffably weird Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, a beautiful but opaque portrait of life in a small village in which the principal character is either a ghost or a reincarnated avatar of a dead emigrant villager. Jallikattu is only about one hour and forty minutes long and has a simple, if epic, plot arc. Every frame is packed with wild action: Pellissery's movies also resemble the films of the great Russian director Alexei German -- they are hyper-violent, everyone battering everyone else and whole groups of men brawling continuously. (I have no idea if this is Pellissery's idiosyncratic view of human nature or some kind of documentary comment on the Malayalam-speaking villagers that he chronicles in his films; the continuous punching and slapping, kicking and wrestling, is particularly bizarre because village men in southwest India were skirts that they are constantly adjusting and hitching up before they get involved in fisticuffs -- a prelude to a fight, generally, involves a burly guy with hair on his shoulders, yanking his knee-length skirt into position before attacking his adversary.
I have said that Jallikattu is epic. The movie features several thousand extras, fantastically elaborate takes that track characters as they stomp around their villages or charge recklessly through the forest, and, probably, seventy or so speaking parts. But the plot is very simple and easily understood, although almost all the details are culturally inexplicable. A villager named Vincent attempts to slaughter a bull in the gloom of the forest at night time. The bull escapes and terrorize the villagers. More and more people gather to hunt the animal through the jungle. The narrative progresses from an unassuming anecdote of village life to a cosmic vision of human cruelty and madness. At first, the film is comical, but, as the bull's rampage continues, the imagery becomes increasingly disturbing and unhinged. The final sequence is visionary and terrifying. The picture begins with a sort of prelude in which we see people waking before dawn in a small village in heavily wooded mountains. The chief industry in the village seems to be slaughtering beef cattle for their meat. (As in The Angemaly Diaries everyone is fanatically carnivorous and people traipse around with bulging plastic sacks of livers and entrails and cuts of beef.) The narrative involves several strands that interwoven in complex sequences that take place over about three days and nights. One self-satisfied man, a member of the bourgeoisie, is planning a menu for a wedding, probably his daughter's nuptial; of course what's on the menu is beef and pork mutton so spicy "as to be memorable." The young lovers try to elope, presumably to avoid the wedding, but their motorcycle fails and they slink back home. An important villager named Anthony has, apparently, informed on another man, Kuttaijan who was sent to prison for smuggling on that basis. Anthony and Kuttaijan hate one another passionately -- there is probably some other basis for their rage, but I couldn't figure it out from the movie and the murky subtitles. Kuttaijan is much-admired by a group of young hoodlums who spend all day drinking and dancing in the streets of the small, impoverished village. Someone sends for Kuttaijan who is the local tough-guy and who owns a "licensed" gun. Kuttaijan enters the village in triumph with his rifle, the great hunter who is planning to dispatch the enraged bull. The local police who seem to exist mainly to slap people around can't take action against the bull because this will require a court decree, something likely to result in delays of a month or more. (Meanwhile the bull has rampaged through a garden of Ayuravedic medicinal plants owned by the town's sole Hindu and sole vegetarian. The cops tell the holy man to get a "licensed" gun and shoot the bull. This is beyond his purview -- he has said that killing "innocent animals" is a sin in which he will not be involved.) Kuttaijan tries to shoot the bull but it smashes apart half the town and hurls itself wildly down the heavily forested slopes of the mountain where the town is located. Anthony gets a gun somewhere and competes with Kuttaijan for the honor of shooting the animal but both fail. The bull ends up trapped in a well. The townspeople lower Anthony into the pit on a rope and he somehow lassoes the bull. As they are raising Anthony and the bull out of the well, a thunderstorm releases a downpour and the ropes slip. Some villagers get fatally gored as the bull escape and others end up dead in the bottom of the well. Anthony and Kuttaijan abandon their pursuit of the bull to fight seemingly to the death in the mud; just as they are about to succeed in killing one another, the bull intervenes and knocks them both down. By this time, tens of thousands of villagers have gathered with torches to pursue the enraged bull -- the animal is now mutilated, like a bovine Moby Dick with a dozen lances and spears sticking out of his flesh. The animal evades the army of hunters but gets mired in muddy field. Anthony tries to wrestle the bull to the ground by grabbing and twisting its horns. Then, thousands of villages reach the mud hole and, throwing themselves onto Anthony and the bull, they create a writhing human pyramid probably sixty feet high. No one and nothing can survive under the mountain of mud stained men, all of them clawing and wrestling with one another while human landslides occur with dozens of men toppling down the slopes of the pile. Somehow the bull has escaped. An old man who is dying in his hut hears a sound, laboriously rises and sees the badly wounded bull outside his window, huffing and puffing and stamping at the ground.
In the film's prelude, we see insects swarming, a shot repeated with moths later, in the film and clearly the conduct of the villagers, at least in the second half of the film is equated to ants and flies and spiders. After about an hour, the film departs from any sort of plausible reality and becomes a parable of human cruelty and wickedness on a grandiose level. Hints of the picture's magical realism are evident in the first hour. One of carnivore villagers says that the best meat of all is human flesh. When the bull tears the village apart, a house is set afire -- the bull seems to have run through bonfire in the woods. "What is the relation between the bull and fire" someone asks quizzically. A bank is foreclosing on a house and, at one point, the bull smashes through bank and terrorizes the bankers: "What is the relation between the bull and interest rates?" someone asks. Disturbing aspects in the film are manifest in early scenes when the tone is light and humorous. We first see Anthony blithely slapping his wife's face as hard as he can about five minutes into the film. Why? What has she done? In the world of the film, people's conduct is uniformly irrational and violent. Later, when Anthony plans to be lowered into the well to extract the bull, he goes home, more or less rapes his wife, and, then, picks up a coil of heavy rope. His wife tells him to make certain that he bring some choice steaks cut from the bull after he captures it. The film is grotesque tauromachy, a vision from Goya. Jallikattu refers to a local festival in which a bull is tormented, stabbed and gouged, and finally murdered while young men try to ride the poor beast. A title notes that "no animals were injured in the making of the film" -- but the scenes of violence involving the bull are a bit like the sequences with the Great White Shark in Jaws, convincing and frightening at the same time. Pellissery's villagers, who are all nominally Roman Catholic -- they bestow lavish gifts of beef on their priests -- seem somehow perverted by their habit of eating meat. The film is a vast survey of human savagery. The last third of the picture has to be seen to be believed.
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