It has been four years since the Pollachi case came to light — a horrifying crime involving multiple rapes, blackmail, and abuse of political power that shook Tamil Nadu. Justice remains elusive to the survivors to this day. But in the meantime, Kollywood has had no qualms about producing films ‘inspired’ by the case. Does cinema constantly draw upon real life for stories to tell? Yes. Do all of the stories understand how to represent violent events, without becoming a trigger to survivors of trauma? No.
Consider Ariyavan for instance, the latest ‘Pollachi genre’ film to come out of Kollywood. In the film, a gang of men have a very specific modus operandi to find women they can force into sex work. One of them identifies a woman, gets into a relationship with her, the sex between them is superficially consensual — it's secretly filmed. The videos are then used to blackmail the woman into becoming a sex worker. She is beaten into submission. Some of the women thus trafficked die by suicide. All of this is graphically shown on screen to the chorus of agonised screams and crying of women.
In the real-life Pollachi incident, a gang of four men routinely lured women to hotels, either raped or convinced them to have sex with them, filmed the sex and used the videos to extort money, jewellery or more sex (i.e. rape).
Imagine for a moment, you have survived such an ordeal. And you see that movie directors think it’s okay to pass off your suffering as ‘entertainment’. How would survivors feel when they watch the trauma of rape and blackmail — their most powerless moments — dramatised insensitively on towering theatre screens? Or would watching such events play out be any easier for women who aren’t one of the survivors in the Pollachi case? I assure you, it wasn’t. To sit there in a darkened hall, drowning in the images and screams, is in a word, triggering. It is watching some of your worst nightmares play out with Dolby sound.
Ariyavan is not the first film to make a reference to the Pollachi case. Last year, a star of Suriya’s popularity decided to act in Etharkkum Thuninthavan — a film about a lawyer who turns to vigilante justice to avenge women whose sexual relationships are secretly filmed and used to blackmail them, and as pornography. Several of the women are murdered and their deaths staged as suicides. The violence is depicted with stomach-churning detail, before Suriya wreaks bloody vengeance on the perpetrators.
The same year (2022) also gave us Nenjuku Needhi, the Tamil-remake of Article 15. The Hindi original was based on the Baduan gangrape and so the story was set in Uttar Pradesh. Nenjuku Needhi was set in Pollachi. A faithful remake of Article 15, with the DMK manifesto thrown into the dialogues for good measure, the film starring Udhaynidhi Stalin was rife with violent imagery and enactments of caste-based and sexual assault.
What do all three movies have in common, besides recreating traumatic events? Self-righteous male heroes who turn saviours. In Nenjuku Needhi, at least the lead doesn’t turn to vigilantism given the original’s storyline. But both Ariyavan and Etharkkum Thuninthavan revel in telling a revenge fantasy. They don’t address systemic failures, the everyday misogyny, the proprietorial view of women’s bodies, right to sexual agency. The survivor characters decided to fight back only after the hero shames and goads them. The hero becomes the benevolent ‘anna’ (elder brother) who will deliver a twisted form of justice that simply involves the slaughter of perpetrators. These are very cisgender, heterosexual male fantasies from men who refuse to look within themselves at the power they wield.
In real life, it is survivors who come forward demanding justice. If the reaction of Kollywood during MeToo — both the deafening silence from stars and the vilifying of survivors — can be used as a metric, this is not an industry that truly seems to care about justice for sexual violence.
The Tamil film industry seems to operate according to trends of what ‘message padam’ can be most marketable. Sexual violence, farmers pitted against multinational corporations, the Eelam struggle, the anti-caste movement or any other social justice issue, have all become plot devices. It’s not that these issues should not be highlighted through cinema. But there’s a vast leap between informed, respectful portrayals, and dramatising trauma with little concern for how real-life survivors of sexual or caste-based violence or the atrocities of war may feel.
If well-meaning directors want to make such films, how else do they convey the seriousness of the issue, some may ask. That’s where a filmmaker worth that tag would, if they were committed to the needs of survivors, apply their minds. Without directors politicising themselves first, all we’d get are the kind of lazy cinematic choices Ariyavan or Etharkkum Thuninthavan make.
One example that stood out to me in recent times, I can leave you with, though. In the adaptation of the book She Said — the story of how Harvey Weinstein was finally exposed, director Maria Schrader made a very careful choice. Each time a survivor recounted what Weinstein did, the camera panned to the site of the incident, but it was devoid of people. A hotel room, a running shower, a bathrobe, elements from their experience are shown. Without fanfare. All we hear is the survivor's voice, just her words. No frantic music, no screams, no blood nor bodies. But whether Kollywood’s male stars and male directors are capable of ceding that much space to women, is another question entirely.
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