Mirugam (Animal): Land of the Beasts
A landscape no man could tame, the geography of nature’s wrath. Barren miles blasted by sun and lacerated by sandstorms, heathen lands cursed off even the most basic of nature’s bounties and claimed by the wild. Apocalypse acres where men and beast have perished of thirst and scorch, home to bandits and scorpions, where atoms are split in an experiment in holocaust, where Mad Max and other motorheads scourged and pillaged for petroleum and continued existence, where Riddley Walker came of age.
Survival is in raw instinct. The more animal the better.
Where then is God- the one who blesses and provides? What in the forsaken landscape inspires the idea of divine benevolence? What then is justice? What is morality?
Piercing existential questions chant in the soundtrack as a knife-wielding behemoth of a man gives chase to his heavily pregnant wife in the godforsaken terrain in jealous fury. In grave danger she runs across the village- the presiding deity sitting unmoving and aloof, nothing more than the lifeless structure that he is- all his pride, glory and power crafted in paint and plaster. No man will dare come forward. Thorny stunted shrubs offer little cover in the vast blazing horizon. The burn of the sand, wind and heat only make her escape tougher. Her husband, in the grip of bloodlust, more beast than man, shows no sign of letting her and the unborn child alive. There is no love, no forgiveness in him, only retribution and violence.
The chase goes long without letting up, even when she gets onto a bus and escape to a far-away temple town. It is not mere co-incidence that has landed the man in the most unlikeliest of places in his hunt, it is his animal instinct. Born in a brothel, forced into murder at a tender age, failing to find his place in society, he has embraced his existence as the outcast. There was no reason for him to be a human like there was no god, no justice, no morality in the land that brought him up. As the song reaches its end, the hero is dwarfed by a majestic temple gopuram exasperated at the futility of his chase.
But lest assured it was hardly divine intervention that saved his pregnant wife, it was the anonymity that the new landscape provided.
Following his controversial, sexually-charged chronicle of a widow trying to seduce her brother-in-law ‘Uyir’, Director Sami lays claim to the ‘enfant terrible’ crown with his brave, unflinching portrayal of alienation, dystopia, doom and ultimately the courage to transgress and survive. Going beyond mere provocation, genre, structure and other specifics, ‘Mirugam’ is a rare film where the director’s vision, however bleak and nihilistic, cuts through from the core of the film with white-hot intensity and burns itself onto the audience. In the tradition of Gaspar Noe, Sami invokes a damnation not for individual, society or sect but humanity as whole. He makes one confront one’s own perception and ultimately hands each one our own ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’.
The movie begins with energy and drive, not unlike a regular Tamizh film, juxtaposing mythic close-ups of protagonist Ayyanar with the landscape. His village seems to have a serious issue thrust upon them. Neighboring villagers have arrived to announce that it is no longer possible for them to share their water resource and for now, the village will have to fend for their own in the aridness. As the issue seems to boil over heated debates, choppers and other weapons are being secretly distributed among the crowd. Violence seems imminent and with it the hero makes his grand entry. Nothing could be more clichéd. A disheveled dusty arrogant hulk of muscle and hair, towering several feet over the villagers, he walks with powerful yet cool strides to the discussion. The audience whistles and braces for some prime action. Ayyanar just scoffs and keep walking ahead. Standing up for his society is just not his idea of spending the day.
In Ayyanar, director Sami has crystallized the most volatile, angst-ridden, inhuman anti-hero since Rob Zombie chronicled the cannibalistic Firefly family with heroic aplomb in ‘The Devil’s Rejects’. His actions are as depraved as humanity can get. He is a sexual predator who won’t flinch at manipulating his friend before forcefully violating his wife. Desperate enough, he doesn’t even spare a young insane street urchin. He threatens and steals from whores. In drunken fury, he doesn’t hesitate to thrash his servile emaciated old mother only because she gave permission to the villagers to dig a well in the backyard. He’s a selfish arrogant swine with not a single redeeming quality.
But Sami doesn’t attempt to categorize him as villainous. Rather he skewers morality and Ayyanar becomes our protagonist, the very anti-thesis of all those now caricatured alpha Tamizh heroes, the anti-hero. We are offered to share his debauched point of view as he gazes longingly at voluptuous folds of flesh. As we partake in his fetish our own consciences are called into question. “You are no man, you are a beast”, they still keep telling him.
In a brief sentimental flashback we are shown glimpses of Ayyanar’s warped childhood. Director Sami deftly defies convention in establishing themes of dystopia and the plight of the minority against the majority. Born a boy in a whorehouse, his birth is greeted with disapproval. In the matriarchal society of the whorehouse, a boy is of no profit or use. In a continuing metaphor, Ayyanar is shown to be in the constant company of just two souls- one, his friend Idi Thangi and the other, Karupan, the bull. Karupan is not unlike Ayyanar, he’s a magnificent bull, hefty as can be but his only use is as a stud for impregnating cows with a promise that his seed will give birth to another cow, from which Ayyanar earns his commission and living.
Sami finds his story’s humanity, conscience and courage in Alagamma. She’s a hardworking daughter of the earth, intelligent, loving but life in the scorched lands has taught her to slit any throat that tries to go wise on her. She’s resilient enough to fend for herself and her orphaned siblings and refuses to give in to marriage until she finds a groom who can accept not only her but all of them which manipulative Ayyanar does. Even as she suffers abuse at the hands of her new husband she lashes back at him until it is only his overwhelming girth that gets the better of her. Still she gradually and with care begins to draw out the humanity in him.
But there is no easy redemption in the land of the damned. A scuffle lands Ayyanar in prison where fellow inmates hook him onto grass and smack and before long, he giddily, trapped in the cell and desperate, debaunched, contemplates homosexuality. Director Sami confronts this taboo directly, a minor silhouette used only perhaps to conform to the censor board. Ayyanar’s instincts and claustrophobia force him into jealousy as he images his wife having a liaison with her own uncle. Released from jail and in rage he chases his pregnant wife to a temple town where he ends up living like a junkie in the streets. Soon after, his health begins to fail. He collapses vertiginously to the ground but luckily is discovered and rescued by Idi.
It is the 80s. A new dreaded disease has reared its head. It is a faceless demon that no one can grasp nor survive. Originating from Africa, the deadly invisible plague has found its way to our shores. The radio keeps talking about AIDS, spreading more alarm than sense. This is exactly the moment where one would expect Ayyanar to fall on his knees and turn to God but he first tries to kill his new born by dashing him to the ground before kicking a beggar on the way out. On reaching home, he finds his health faltering and scabs on his skin. Soon he is again arrested by the police and this time placed in a dank solitary cell. His offence this time around is that he is an AIDS victim. Unlike the first time around, Ayyanar finds himself overawed by the circumstances. In an outlandish sequence, as masked-and-hooded doctors in quarantine suits enter the cell for examination, the once arrogant beast is too confused to rebel. He quietly stretches out in front of them as they prod him like he were just any specimen, whispering scientific terminologies that are beyond his grasp.
By the time of his return to the village, the paranoia surrounding the disease has become acute. Ayyanar already shaken by the harrowing experience in prison tries to bully the villagers with brute force and conceit but now the very open landscape where he towered has him feeling vulnerable and exposed. Like Frankenstein’s monster he is shunned and feared. Even the whores refuse to touch him. Unable to bear the indignity, he flees the village to someplace where he can continue living recklessly and now as a host to HIV, dangerously as he awaits inevitable death.
Meanwhile Alagamma tries to fend for her son and mother-in-law while the villagers stricken by an unknown fear and inspired by Ayyanar’s new vulnerability gang up in a mob wielding torches as they proceed to reduce his house to ash. The poojari who had always doubted the existence of the Gods now declares glory to Them. Mob fury, charged but unsatisfied with what they have done now proceed to drive the whores out of the village. They were the very ones who had once told Ayyanar,” You are no human, but a beast.”
Years pass and Alagamma is resilient about surviving with dignity and in the search for her husband. Getting news of his whereabouts in a hospital, Alagamma finds him looking horribly atrophied. It is a scene in which Director Sami infuses a subtle care and heart where he could have easily gone in for shock value. When we first see him he is cloaked in a sheet and we are unable to see his face, only his eyes but the grotesqueness concealed seems repulsive. When he sheds his cloak, we get to see Alagamma’s face. Her eyes are horrified at first glance but then there is sympathy and later love. Only then do we get to see Ayyanar from her point of view. As we see him, once magnificent, now reduced to a sub-human like he was from ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’, there is deep sadness.
As Alagamma returns with Ayanaar to the village they are picked on and stoned. Ayyanar reduced to blindness and crawling, pines for his death but there is no easy deliverance for him. He embarks on a path to redemption. Not because he fears karma or retribution but because it is the right way. He gives his prize bull to Idi Thangi, he flings himself selflessly against a pack of dogs to protect his son and finally, decides to get the well dug in his old backyard. In his crumbling beastial façade, Ayyanar becomes a man.
Director Sami indicts the gender divide, the caste system, the financial divide, the media but his indictment goes beyond it all. He indicts power and its corruption. He lashes out at the power structure. He unearths a vicious circle where the majorities are apathetic towards the minorities and in case, the circle swings vice versa and positions are interchanged, the dynamics would remain the same. He regrets at the deceit in the human heart and the mercenary urge for evil and tyranny over the less fortunate. Equality and justice are not be sought in the corridors and structures of power but in our hearts. His is a harrowing plea, a cautionary tale against the corruption in the quest for power. In a way, ‘Mirugam’ is a chronicle of extinction, of man bringing his own fall and the vicious power circle is the Ouroboros, the mythical snake that eats its own tale.
Alagamma’s final speech is this devastating howl for humanity. But as not a single villager appears to budge, she curses them, spits on the ground, walks over to her fallen husband, heaves him across her shoulders, child in tow, she walks towards the pyre. And it rains. Not from any God. It rains for Alagamma, courage, love and humanity. She and her son are anointed by ash of the beast who found, perhaps better late than never, the man within.
It’s a tremendous coda to the epic. Alagamma’s image as inspiring and provoking as Nargis across the plough in the momentous scene from ‘Mother India’.
Ramnath Shetty’s stark cinematography and Thotta Tharani’s minimal sets capture Director Sami’s apocalyptic vision. The editing seems a tad sloppy at times, feeling like there’s a fumbling projectionist behind it all. Director Sami, at the very fundamentals, has made a quintessential Tamizh film. There are needless songs, cheesy scenes, the stock-in-trade jester(Idi Thangi), outlandish fight sequences, laughably bad cgi representations of HIV infection but when spliced with the dazzling intensity of his other scenes the movie takes on the surreal texture of febrile nightmare. Debutant Aadhi as Ayyanar gives an incredible debut in grand Tamizh theatrical tradition but it is Padmapriya as Alagamma who delivers the seminal performance. Both performances are brave and have have an authentic coarseness about them. Perhaps they will go down in time as icons of Indian Cinema.
Muddled in controversies and quandaries from conception to release, ‘Mirugam’, director Sami’s vision is dark, nihilistic, epic… he doesn’t shy away from presenting an uncomfortable and ugly side to the nation that is deemed best forgotten by the rest of it. But unlike Gaspar Noe, he has yet to give up hope in humanity. There is chance yet for the rest of us.
(pics and info courtesy:- Tamil Galatta, Chennai365)
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
[I haven't seen this film, have only caught some scenes on television (which was enough indication for me, I thought, on what the film is like). So, please take this post with a pinch of salt, and do spank a little on my head if I'm speculating a bit too much.]
Hi Siddharth,
Which “land” are we talking about here? Which “land” really has this man, this beast, who would go to such extremes as if he’s making his daily living out of it? I ask this, because the film attempts to portray the “reality” of the world it is set in. I think this is just outrageously unfettered fetishism channeled out as realism of the “land” we, the urban film-watching audience, can gaze at. Like an outstandingly perceptive critic (and a good friend) put it about the recent spate of such violent films set in a rural mileu in Tamil, “it [the genre] does run the risk of enabling an urban audience to turn an
ahoy! the beast rises from the slumber!
@Zero… hey man.. you just seemed to have misunderstood. I’m aware it is extremely easy for non-Tamizh urban middle class guy like me to indulge in the ‘orientalist’ view and start taking anthropological notes and go Jane Goodall but hey.. what i’m talking about in my review is that the movie goes beyond the specifics… genres and the subaltern view and all that baggage.. for me it is great because it aims past all that.. like i mention sure there is a lot of crassness but what the movie achieves is a semblance of truth.. jus how many flicks do that… and anyway, when we’ve taken same ol’ same ol’ urban crap for the past so many years why not indulge in some cool homegrown rustixploitation.. but i agree that post ‘Paruthiveeran’ there is always a scope for cheap sendups of the genre and also since you haven’t seen the movie, your fears expressed were similar to what i had before i saw it. so i’d like you do that.. see it.. then maybe we’ll have something to celebrate and slap hands
@Tushar.. yeah man long time.. anyways, i see you got like a lot of knock offs on the lyrics thing of which i believe you were Niel Armstrong.. so i guess there’s a tradition with a faded pic of yours where PFC makes it to children’s textbooks
Siddharth,
No, no, it’s not about the non-Tamizh audience at all, man. I’m as alien to the milieu as anyone else here would be.
I do appreciate that your appreciation of the film has gone really beyond the “gaze” thing. (Pardon me for not mentioning this.) But, I must say, I was completely dumbstruck by what is passed off as “realism” here.
[SPOILER ALERT] I mean, here’s a guy who goes around raping many women (his wife and a street-side beggar included), who severs his mom’s ear to get her earring, and wants to kill the child of his wife. [SPOILER END]
Suhasini (she reviews Tamil films of late in a local TV channel) even had the gall to say that, though she “knows” this is a realistic depiction of life and she appreciates the film for that, she felt she could take only so much gore in a film. (It’s not verbatim, but she said something to this effect.) Whoa, really! This is such a brutally insensitive caricature of a village boor. I don’t think he’s at least shown to be a psychotic or something.
@ Sid, lol!talk about it man.
I know shit about this film or anything remotely related to it, but loved your write-up for the frequent parallels that you draw.
@Zero.. i’m a lil late, man.. weekend got in the way.. i can get your vibe.. such suckin up and half ass complacency by ‘i’m-flautin-urban-suave’ reviews can lead to prejudice.. but reality or not is not the issue when it comes to ‘mirugam’.. it’s a bigger picture.. a state of affairs.. a depressing one.. sure, ayyanar is a psychopath.. or more likely a sociopath.. but what Sami draws out beneath this surface of brute force and agression is an outcaste who has hardened up inside in his quest to adapt and survive in society.. reality could go for a toss.. i mean what reality.. Sami has gone in for metaphor.. a pointed one.. discussing on teh reality of the film would be useless.. like i said.. it’s more like a fever dream than a regular narrative.. dude.. trust me on this one