Naal Pennungal (Four Women): He Knows What They Are Talking About
J’ACCUSE’,(I Accuse) screamed the old man at the audience exuding an impotent violence as he watched both the world and fate swoop down vulture-like on his hardworking, self-sacrificing daughter’s plight. It is a scene of tremendous provocation causing the audience, till then sitting comfortably in the auditorium ‘watching’ Ritwik Ghatak’s classic ballad of womanhood and sacrifice to reach out for their hearts and souls in panic. A scramble for emotions. An existential dilemma. How human are you? What can you do? There is an overawing claustrophobic misery as the audience comes to terms with its own helplessness. Then on, as the movie proceeds, one either harbors delusions of some kind of hope, nothing short of a miracle or has given in to the inevitable bleakness at the end.
With ‘Naal Pennungal’(Four Women) only his eleventh feature film in a career spanning over three decades, auteur Adoor Gopalakrishnan puts himself in the old man’s shoes accusing the rigidity of the prejudices of the law, the caste-system, tradition, society, family, man and also other women. While the old man’s accusations were an emotional outburst, Director Adoor contemplates the larger picture, draws out the complexities and layers, with subtle, pitch-black satire and sentimentality ridicules and indicts the understated but firm retrograde prejudices. Without crying hoarse with poster propaganda, he engages the authoritative nature of the prejudices in debate before sending them up as unreasonable. Four stories by Jnanapith laureate Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai set the template for his reflections.
At the beginning of the first segment, The Prostitute, there is slight disconcertment over the curious tableau of the love story between the laborer Pappukutty and the prostitute Kunju Pennu. There is something cardboard and hollow about the characters but as the movie proceeds one can’t help but snicker to oneself as Director Adoor reveals a wry humor at play. He is offering a hypothesis for his debate. Suppose, he seems to saying, there was a laborer content with his pittance wages and who loves and trusts his wife to the extent that if she once asks him never to remind her of the past, he readily accepts and without a single question. Suppose there is a prostitute who gives up her profession after her marriage and is reformed as she begins to toil with hands and begins to appreciate the value of hard earned money, even if it is only a rupee a day. A miserable utopia of two. This absurd idyll of life is disrupted when past catches up with Kunju Pennu as husband and wife lying homeless on the street are picked up by the police. As they’re produced in the courtroom, Director Adoor unfolds a powerful coda to the segment as the judge condescendingly asks for documented proof of their story. What is the proof of where they belong to? What is the proof of their marriage? What is the proof that the prostitute has mended her ways? The defendants stand with heads hung in shame meekly accepting the ridicule and ruling of the judge as a clock ticks away somewhere in the background. It is as if in the scheme of time-space, these meek creatures with no space of their own are now being damned by time.
The next segment, The Virgin, chronicles a brief period in the unhappy marriage of Kumari. With her father in ill health she has always managed the finances of the household on her own. A strong independent woman, she had been taking her time carefully choosing her suitors before her mother inspite of better advise forces her into marriage with Narayanan, who has a reputation of being a decent hard-working man. Signs of worry are evident as he avoids even glancing at his new bride even for a single moment all through the marriage and the boat ride home. On reaching home he promptly decides to leave for work as his mother rattles proudly to the new bride that it is her upbringing that has set the mould for her son who doesn’t indulge in anything that involves wasting money- smoking, drinking, gambling etc. The rift becomes complete when the newlyweds decide to visit the bride’s house. The stage is now set for the director’s trademark ‘eating’ sequences. His attention demanding, slow and prolonged sequences of rice and curry being rolled into morsels and swallowed and chewed have been the stock-in-trade everyman’s critique and parody. Here, however the food sequence forms the crux of the segment as Narayanan voraciously hogs down morsel after morsel with a pig-like selfish single-mindedness as the in-laws stand around and fawn lovingly. It’s a broad comic sequence tinged with the darkness that Kumari has descended into. Later at night when she tries to touch him, he shuns her off complaining of heat. Kumari also expresses her displeasure. The next day after he has dutifully pigged down his breakfast he leaves alone for his house without giving any intimation as to when he will return to take back his bride. A month passes by and Kumari returns to her old life and her work. She might be willing to forget the past and the move on but just like the law in ‘The Prostitute’, family and society are too concerned or curious to let go. Rumors begin to spark. For all her hard-work, courage and independence, the family views her as an embarrassment. The segment ends tentatively and with hope as Kumari, once taciturn and docile begins to come onto her own challenging the chauvinism of the world around her. The notable aspect of this segment is how Director Adoor exploring the aspects of a matriarchal society, unapologetically blames women themselves for being party to exploiting one of their own- the petty gossip mongerers, the mother and to a certain extent even the mother-in-law who in her stern demeanor inadvertently raised a stunted individual for a son.
The third segment, The Housewife, contributes least to the quardruptych but continues the critique of bourgeois prejudices from ‘The Virgin’. A Rohmer-esque conversation piece, it is a tale of seduction told with duplicity and wit. Chinnu Amma is a common housewife, living a sedate life, married to a common hard-working man and has probably never left the boundaries of her village. Her only lament is that she hasn’t been able to bear any children. She expresses a deep fascination for Nara Pillai, almost a myth in the village after he ran away from home to end up a rich landlord. He has once again arrived in the village as he is habituated to do once in a few years. From the very first glance, one can detect something suspicious about his persona- his tall stories, his shady demeanor, his Tamizh-accented Malayalam that unknowingly bursts into vernacular clarity. But Chinnu Amma is regaled by his adventures, he is her hero, the one who has ventured and succeeded in the world outside. On the sly, one can sense the sexual dynamics between the two. Nara Pillai is the instigator and the gullible Chinnu Amma follows through at all times aware that she is succumbing to his charms. The true nature of things is often at odds at what is seen and heard and Director Adoor’s masterful attention-to-detail direction turns this middling segment into a delicious one. Watch the husband’s expression pale as Chinnu Amma mentions Nara Pillai. Notice how Nara increases his tone of his voice and switches from seduction to ‘Haridwar’ without skipping a beat as Chinnu alerts him of a relative’s arrival.
The richly layered, complex firmament of the movie now moves into the final segment, The Spinster. When a man arrived with a marriage proposal for her but instead selected her sister, it was as if a hex was cast on Kamakshi’s destiny. Her mother contemplates that perhaps she was destined to live in a marriage-less purgatory. Her brother promises the mother that he will not marry until he finds Kamakshi a husband but plots with the local pundit to convince his mother that even if the third sister and the brother get married, there is still hope for the elder sister. Kamakshi meanwhile struggles with the prejudices cast upon her as she drifts lonesome into herself. Reduced to the pariah, she feels the loneliness and repression suffocating her. Director Adoor evocatively frames Kamakshi’s descent into seclusion. At her sisters’ wedding, Kamakshi is left alone in the dressing room gazing into solitude as one by one everyone departs with even a glance at her. The tour-de-force sequence of her trying to sleep, writhing restlessly as she strains with the misery of her being. Kamkshi as a blur in the background in scenes where she slowly comes to the foreground, as if she’s an afterthought. The mother on her deathbed sees all her children with their spouses except for her eldest daughter, the sorrow of her life. After the mother’s death, Kamakshi moves in with her sister and her husband, the man who spurned her. She helps around the house and regales her time with her sister’s two girls. But her presence sparks rumors in the neighborhood and jealousy in the mind of the sister. Kamakshi decides to move back to her house and the movie finds its final image.
Kamakshi sitting disheveled on her bed as she says,” A woman should be able to live without a man”. A confident statement? An unanswerable question? A plea? A dictum she is trying to force herself to accept? Director Adoor leaves the ending open and subjective to the audience. It is moment when one tries to reconcile what one has gathered from all four segments and ones own morality and belief comes into play as each one fashions his own ending.
‘J’accuse’, says the old man.
An image of flowing water bookends the four segments, possibly the backwaters that flow through Allapuzha around which all the stories are set. The prostitute, the virgin, the housewife and the spinster all are woman who are on an average of the same age but inhabiting different life- cycles. There is no evident time in which the stories are set. It all blends poetically into a timeless and singular vision of cinema.
‘Naal Pennungal’ features exceptional cinematography by M.J. Radhakrishnan. He casts Adoor’s masterful mis-en-scenes in a cast that is enduring and seminal- the prostitute and laborer in the courtroom box, the newlyweds going back home in a boat, the bride amid the dark shadows and whispers of the older women of the village, the spinster staring at the mirror. Adoor draws superlative performances from his entourage of actors with the remarkable Geetu Mohandas as Kumari and Nandita Das as Kamakshi leaving an indelible impression. Kavya Madhavan usually typecast as the naughty pudgy heroine of Malayalam cinema relishes her bit part as the impervious sister. On a personal level, I was overjoyed to see Mukesh with a history of playing ‘schemester hero’ essay the conniving Nara Pillai.
‘Naal Pennungal’ is probably Director Adoor’s more accessible films to date. In an oeuvre consisting of the likes of ‘Anantharam’ and ‘Elipathayam’, it will always be relegated to a second rung. It lacks a certain idiosyncrasy that has marked his best but nonetheless his latest entry into the increasingly lonely field of art-house cinema is vital. In times where director Pradeep Sarkar shamefully tried to peddle bathroom soap in the name of defining the Indian Woman, ‘Naal Penungal’ is just cause for a round of applause and some celebration.
(pics by asiaticafilmmediale, cinemaofmalayalam, trailer by Indulekha)
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
thanx for this Sidharth…
been waiting for someone to see it..
most accessible to date would (arguably) have to be Mathilukal though
are any of adoor’s movies available on dvd? if so, where? thanks
@dabba,
dunno whether they are commercially available but your best bet would be to check film schools/libraries. they WILL have them. try any french cultural center.
This was a very nice read. By the way, any idea who did the background score?
It is really a haunting melody.
@Gopi.. background score to the movie was done by Issac Thomas Kottukapaly who also scored for the hip ‘Sancharam’ score.
@dabba.. some of his films are available with Artificial Eye.. i think it’s a Brit Film Institute Initiative.. and yeah.. the French cultural center would be a good place
@DPac.. as accessible but better than ‘Mathilukal’
this movie is a must to see..for those people interested in indian culture…about their belief of caste system,..and how’s the woman in india are experiencing..i hope this will be an eye opener for viewers..