The darkly funny world of Lijo Pellissery: Snapshots of an extraordinary filmmaker

Lijo Jose Pellissery has got to be a workaholic. When his film Ee.Ma.Yau. was receiving honours at the Goa film festival last year, all Lijo could think about was the movie he'd stopped shooting to make the trip. That film – Jallikattu – is now receiving admiration and applause internationally, having had a premiere outside of India. Lijo, however, does not want to talk too much about it before the Indian release. He says he has said all that there is to say, when we ask for an interview. In all probability he has begun work for his next work.

“It is almost like he has got a machine,” says film critic Baradwaj Rangan, impressed with the way Lijo keeps churning out films, moving from one set to another.

If you look at his filmography, it is only seven movies so far and that’s counting Jallikattu. Seven films in nine years, and Lijo is already a name to reckon with. “Angamaly Diaries, his movie before Ee.Ma.Yau. is what took his name outside of Kerala. Ee.Ma.Yau. was of course a far superior film, I don’t know why it didn’t go to the Oscars,” Baradwaj says.

Ee.Ma.Yau. talked about death and was a dark yet hilarious satire. Chemban Vinod, the actor Lijo has cast in every one of his movies, plays the restless son running hither and thither in the night to organise a proper funeral for his dad, one that the people of the coast will remember. Things, of course, go wrong – the perfect coffin breaks, the ‘wrong’ mourners come, the priest is slapped, it is all a mess.

“It is such a light film about death. He takes these heavy subjects but with a very deceptively light flavour,” says Baradwaj.

Before Ee.Ma.Yau and Angamaly Diaries was Double Barrel, a gangster comedy, with many stars in it. Baradwaj thinks perhaps it was not that great, ‘there was too much spoofy kind of stuff that didn’t work’. What you notice, however, is Lijo’s refusal to stick to a type, any type. You don’t expect the man who made a crime film like Nayakan – his first – to then come back with an experimental one like City of God, and then two years afterward a musical satire. You can’t pick out a single movie of his and tick a checklist of what makes it a Lijo movie. Anything can be a Lijo movie. If you look hard, there might be a certain rustic element and a certain chilling darkness among his characters and in the air they breathe. There is also an adherence to good music, Prasanth Pillai a fixture like Chemban.

Film critic Anna MM Vetticad says, “Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of India's finest contemporary filmmakers and astutest chroniclers of the human condition. His cinematic signature is his uncommon ability to squeeze gravitas out of ludicrousness and humour out of pathos, which lies at the heart of his knack for turning seemingly ordinary everydayness into extraordinary cinema.”

Amen with Fahadh Faasil at the centre of it could have been another romantic comedy, a few songs exchanged between the man with a clarinet and a woman in white clothes. But it is turned into a din, many characters walking into the heart of the romance, a god among them. PS Rafeeq, Lijo’s first scriptwriter, wrote Amen too. You never know where Lijo will bring his next reference from. For Angamaly Diaries, it is his mate Chemban who wrote the screenplay and the two of them put their heads together and brought 86 new actors on the screen. Chemban smartly played a cameo in this story about gangs and pigs and everything that’s local to the people of Angamaly. For Ee.Ma.Yau. he went to a writer he is fond of: PF Mathews. Lijo took the settings and atmosphere of Mathews’s Chavunilam but the rest was new.

“Cinephiles outside southern India have woken up to Pellissery's distinctive voice only in recent years due to a happy confluence of circumstances surrounding Angamaly Diaries and Ee.Ma.Yau. First, the social media platforms have proved to be a handy tool for Indian filmmakers outside Bollywood who are up against the massive pro-Hindi, pro-Bollywood bias of the north India based English news media and exhibition sector. Second, through all these years, he has stayed true to his filmmaking convictions. At a time when too many Indian directors are trying to sound and look 'international' or 'national' - whatever that means - in a bid to gain a wider audience, Pellissery is embracing his roots more closely with each passing film. In doing so he has become a fine example of how cultural specificity in a work of art tends to give it greater universality,” Anna says.

Jallikattu, therefore, is something Lijo’s admirers have been looking forward to. So far, it is only clear that there is a buffalo running amok, that it is a conflict of man and beast. And that it’s dark.

“As a filmmaker, Lijo sir has immense clarity of vision. Coming fresh off rehearsals of a stage production (A Very Normal Family), I had spent time trying to do some homework for Sophie, my character in Jallikattu. Lijo sir, however prefers a more unrehearsed, spontaneous performance from his actors, so it was an interesting learning experience for me to let go of my notes -- my security blanket -- and just trust the moment,” says Santhy Balachandran, one of the lead actors of Jallikattu.

It is something you wonder about, if you are the curious movie-goer. When what you see on the screen can be so haunting, how does the creator work? Santhy says he will give an ‘okay’ only when he has got what he wanted and he knows exactly what that is. “As an actor it was easy for me to have complete faith because you know you are in good hands with a maker like Lijo Jose Pellissery. And having watched the film and seen how my character has been presented, I can see that Lijo sir's grip on the totality of the narrative has worked in Sophie's favour.”