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NOTE: This post was typed on April 23rd during the Indian Film Festival of LA. Because of server issues I couldn’t post it on time.

I watched my 1st Adoor Gopalkrishnan film last night at IFFLA - FOUR WOMEN. There are two ways about it. One way would be that I would be very objective to just this film without any baggage of his reputation . Another way to look at things would be that I have no idea about his journey as a filmmaker which has lead him to make this film FOUR WOMEN(Naalu Pennungal).
The movie is based on 4 short stories by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai-the Jnanpith award winning Malayalam writer. As the name of the film suggests, the stories deal with differents aspects of four different women’s lives. They are - The Prostitue, the Virgin, the Housewife and the Spinster.

THE PROSTITUTE - The 1st story is about a prostitute(played by a very beautiful Padmapriya) who starts living with a man calling themselves husband & wife. They live on the pavement & get arrested for immoral act in public. This is the weakest part of the film. The minimalism doesnt seem so after a while.

THE VIRGIN is a story of a girl(Geetu Mohandas) who gets married to a reluctant & impotent man. I must add the man has “No Vices” & loves to eat.

THE HOUSEWIFE is a story of a Housewife(Manju Pillai) who is desperate for a child. She even contemplates sleeping with an old schoolmate, but backs off in the end.

THE SPINSTER also presents the same dilemma when Kamakshi(Nandita Das) towards the end realizes that she will never get married, gives in to her bodies desires & invites a man to her room. But like the Housewife in the previous story she also recovers her “Morality”. They both say the same thing, Its not right & I’m not that kind of woman. What a pity. Nandita Das gives another great performance.

The acting by everybody in the film is brilliant. You know if there was ever a character like them, they would say the exact same thing & behave the same way. The music by Isaac Thomas is just right.

The film was introduced as a very subtle piece of work by the maestro Adoor. I will have to disagree. Throughout the film I kept thinking about how we percieve a film as subtle. Just because the film doesn’t have commercial style editing or dialogue, doesn’t make a film subtle. We are so bombarded with commercial style of filmmaking that Four Women is described everywhere as a film where Gopalakrishnan allows his stories to unfold without imposing his authorial voice on them. I think Adoor has imposed his authorial voice on every single frame of the film. We hardly see anything that is unrelated to the characters in the film. Almost the entire film is Close-ups or Mid CUs. Everything seemed well written & choreographed. That to me is not “letting things unfold”. That is a style of filmmaking.
And minimalist style is fine or even this so called subtlety, but both must have a payoff. That is what makes subtleness great. But here its minimalist for the sake of being so. Like someone famous said

In film less is great, but nothing is nothing.

It was also very interesting experience for me as I had just watched Michael Hanake’s amazing 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance just the night before. He has a very similar style of “Observing Life”. There is a shot of a young man practicing Ping-Pong with a machine which goes on for 3 minutes. Thats presenting life. Not Observing. Also that shot was also shown the that man’s life is getting unbearable which will explode in the climax. Like Four Women , Hanake’s film also gets boring at times. But it all comes together in the end. And thats the payoff. Thats what makes you want to watch it again. Without a payoff subtlety can be very boring.

Also I met some friends last night at IFFLA. Met our prodigy Srinivas. Couldn’t talk to him as we were on our way to to screening & was told by everyone that they would here around when we come out. It wasn’t so. But I’m very excited about meeting everyone today.