The work of a master

Realistic characters: Scenes from Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s award-winning movie ‘Oru Pennum Randanum.’

If Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s ‘Nalu Pennungal’ was about the impossibility of love and the systemic exclusion of women from any kind of ‘transgression,’ its sequel ‘Oru Pennum Randanum’ (titled in English as A Cl imate for Crime) is a rumination upon the gaping chasm between law and justice, one that sucks human lives and destinies into its vortex.

Based on Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s stories, the film is set in Travancore of the 1940s – a turbulent period when the Second World War was creating havoc all over the world and the national scene was agog with the waves of the struggle for freedom.

The film captures their seismic rumblings through the lives of people in this faraway place, which turns out to be a microcosm of the larger picture: that of history churning peoples’ lives, and pressing upon its horizon.

It is a film that, in its treatment and tenor, resolutely keeps away from the mad rush of the run-of-the-mill films. Its aural, visual and narrative planes have a pace and tone of their own that prompts one to look at the foibles of life from a clinical distance yet in a totally engrossing manner.

Significantly, the detached format of the film shuns temptations of condemnation, sloganeering or explication. It doesn’t resort to ‘explaining’ away human lives through any social or psychological reasons, nor does it treat its characters as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They are all there, all too real creatures of nature and culture, living out their destinies in all its unpredictability and quirkiness, and also with its daily dose of miracles and grace.

The film consists of four segments – The Thief, The Police, Two Men and a Woman and One Woman, Two Men. The first story is about a thief who, by force of circumstances, is unable to renounce his only ‘means of livelihood’ and is punished by his disgrace more than by law; he loses courage to face his proud son. Here, the ‘laws’ of all the institutions – family, school, neighbourhood, and State – are against him and his ‘just’ needs for a livelihood. Tragically, the law and guilt that society imposes turns his own son’s mind against him. In the second story, two corrupt and wily police men – the ‘grassroots’ representatives of the state, systematically rob an honest rickshaw puller of his savings and also freedom. This part ends with the muted face of Avutha, the rickshaw puller, who has no clue as to what is happening around him, while all the detailed ‘procedures’ of the legal system is working in tandem.

In the third story we find a youngster wavering between ‘obligations’ to his family and society, and the love he feels for his servant whom he impregnates. It is the ‘law’ of what he is expected to do versus the ‘justice’ of what his being yearns for. Woven into this tense occasion, is his friendship with a lawyer and a journey to a quack to explore the possibilities of an abortion. Ultimately, the youngster, like the thief’s son, refuses to succumb to the exigencies of law and resolves to embrace justice and in turn, to face its consequences.

The fourth story, the most sensuous among the four, has a beautiful woman at the centre inviting lovers and inciting stories. Panki Amma is an enigmatic woman to whom men are attracted; she rejects none and seems to offer love to all, may be of different kinds. But the warring lovers - the admiring husband and avaricious lover, fail to satisfy her need for children, which she finds only in the next man in her life.

Despite their awe and ‘lawful’ love and their legal and physical tussles to gain ownership over her, all of them fail to receive the ‘justice’ of her love. No wonder her story unfolds through the narration of an old couple, with the aging wife recounting the juicy details of Panki’s exploits to her husband, thus trying to add spice to the fag end of their lives, as it were.

These narratives are in a way fallouts of the Second World War that is raging faraway. Likewise, within these narratives, we are not privy to the ‘primal events,’ but we are witness only to the aftermath. M.J. Radhakrishnan’s cinematography evocatively captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of these narratives; camera movements are few and far between depicting the stagnant times, and characters are always dominated and enclosed by architecture, objects, vegetation, walls and so on. The sparse yet powerful musical score by Isaac Thomas gently sets the pace, embellishing leitmotifs and adding to the haunting quality of the film.

By distancing us from the immediate and the familiar, the film illuminates overarching structures of injustice that our life is often founded upon. Structuring his narratives in such a way that we are made into critical yet empathetic participants in its unfolding, Adoor poses eternal questions that haunt human society – the troubling questions about law and justice, what is and what ought to be, of existence and yearning, the oppressive present and the possible futures, the near that often occludes our vision and the distant that opens it out to alternative visions.

‘Oru Pennum Randanum,’ which was produced, written and directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, won five Kerala State film awards. It bagged the awards for best feature film, director, scenarist, second best actor (Praveena) and sound recording (T. Krishnanunni and Harikumar).

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