Paravai Kootil Vaazhum Maangal, a segment from the freshly released anthology Modern Love: Chennai directed by Bharathi Raja, dabbles with adultery. It has opened a can of worms on social media with a section of critics eulogising the “revolutionary writing”, while many are ticked off by how the narrative seems to have opportunely disengaged the man from the mess he created in the first place.
Ravi (Kishore), a much-married man, falls in love with a woman on a train, they have a wistful courtship in the backdrop of old Ilayaraja songs and things sail without complications until he decides to break the news to his wife. But even there, the thunderstorm of accusations and emotional turmoil doesn’t quite ensue as expected. On the contrary, there is a baffling serenity at his home.
When Rohini (Vijayalakshmi), the lover, comes home to meet Revathy (Ramya Nambeesan), the wife, the latter greets her as if she is meeting her long-lost friend from school. While Ravi seems dissociated, endlessly puffing cigarettes, the women wade through their discomfort and discuss what to do with the children. The lack of nuance in writing is so shocking that at one point, it looks as if Ravi is part of the audience – unaffected, unaccountable, and almost bored. The conversations between Rohini and Revathy are stilted. When Rohini offers to help in the kitchen, Revathy metaphorically hints that there is no room for a third person, and it lands nowhere.
If the wife is apologetic about the mess created by the man, the lover looks like she landed at the wrong address. Revathy summarises the conflicts that arose in a line, and her role is so superficially written that the actor’s reaction makes us wonder if she has come to terms with the situation or plotted a murder in her mind. From the opening scene, we are able to understand that Revathy is emotionally abandoned in the marriage, saddled with responsibilities, and awfully unhappy. But all such conflicts are conveniently brushed under the carpet, leaving the women to pick up the pieces. Perhaps the intention was to show a resilient woman who walks away with dignity, but Revathy ends up as a grating, pitying picture of compliance. Since she is shown to be a cowering stereotype of a traditional homemaker, it is difficult to buy her easy acceptance of the divorce as well as her decision to leave the children with Rohini.
Bharathi Raja’s is a glorified take on adultery, written and executed through the male gaze, keeping the agency of women tightly fastened to his whims and fancies. And that explains why Ravi ends up having his cake and eating it too.
Romance and boundaries are words that must go together. These boundaries, though invisible, are closely linked to the norms of accepted morality. However, ironically enough, these norms are never tied as much to all aspects of a relationship as they are to the boundaries of specific sexual interactions. We picked a few films from Malayalam where similar themes are explored to see how our filmmakers have fared.
Shyamaprasad’s Oru Njarazhcha (2019) has two extramarital affairs parallel to the narrative. If one marriage has run out of steam after decades, with the man having silently accepted (and without telling much we are made aware of the battles that occurred between them over this issue) his wife’s long-standing affair outside the marriage, the second couple are young, guiltily exploring the carnal pleasures of love. Though the filmmaker keeps the judgmental lens away from both couples, the narrative never bothers to mask the emotional turbulence, moral complexities, and aftereffects of such an intricate and heartbreaking liaison.
Here they explore the rough edges, dwelling in the mindscape of the characters who are constantly walking on eggshells. The men and women own up to their decisions and yet, don’t want to put the clock back in time. If the older woman is more fatigued than guilty after negotiating between right and wrong, the younger woman is still grappling with her reality, caught between guilt and lust.
In the same director’s film Ore Kadal (2007), there is a woman who feels empty in her marriage and steps into an affair with a commitment-phobic professor who has little time to invest in emotional bonds. Again, we are privy to her moral dilemma and emotional troughs, and yet, she is spared the societal audit that comes with it. Even when she decides to walk away from her marriage to a seemingly nice guy with her two young children, you are left feeling that she has chosen herself.
Only KG George had the gumption to talk about the plight of lonely and unhappy married women in seemingly ‘happy’ nuclear families. In Mattoral (1988), it is only when the wife elopes with a mechanic that the otherwise content husband gets a reality check. It was a convenient marriage where the woman quietly took on the traditional role of a caregiver. When her emotional and physical needs are ignored for years, she decides to walk out. And neither is she judged, nor the man victimised. But there can’t be a more heartbreakingly realistic portrayal of the aftermath of misgivings in a marriage than the way the film ends.
That way Kamal’s Meghamalhar (2001) may have crafted quite the divine love story by shifting focus away from narratives of sex and lust towards building a deep and human bond that may never reach its logical end. The film is a surprisingly sensitive offering from the director (who also wrote the screenplay for Iqbal Kuttipuram’s story) about a man and woman who are married to different people, but find themselves drawn towards each other because of an intense, wistful link to a passage in their childhood.
Rarely do we see an extra-marital narrative in Malayalam cinema that tries to explore the emotional infidelity between partners – the easier routes have always been to indulge in physical affairs. Perhaps, only Ranjith Sankar’s Ramante Edenthottam (2017) addressed the nuances of such an affair, where the heroine’s partner’s emotional abuse and indifference gradually pull her towards a gentle, sensitive widower. More than a harbinger of lust or love, it’s a relationship that grows out of loneliness, a validation to balm her sense of self, helping her to eventually find her footing and move on from the toxic marriage. Though there was criticism about the director’s decision to keep it strictly platonic, diving into the physical culmination of their relationship would have perhaps given it the trite slant usually employed in such stories. When filmmakers and writers prefer to cling to lust as the primary and secondary fatalities that lead to such affairs, it proves that they have not bothered to dig deeper into the complexity of such liaisons.
In Meghamalhar, it is interesting to note that Kamal, who has seldom given space for women to step out of patriarchal spaces in his cinema, opts to empathise with the possibility of an emotional extra-marital affair and surprisingly stays away from judging the woman. But then maybe not quite, because everything is played out so that their respective families and relationships remain unscathed. The romance, or rather the soul connection, is handled tenderly – as carefully as one would pluck a rose from its thorny stem without hurting a petal. There is an underlying note of pensiveness in their bond that makes it easier to invest in their romance. Nandita’s (Samyuktha Varma) deeply evocative writings (she is a journalist) predictably act as a catalyst to bring them closer and help her open a chapter in her childhood that remains a searing memory. Maybe that’s one reason to lend her the garb of a writer since writers are said to find it cathartic to write down their deepest secrets.
Her relationship with her husband (Siddique) is ambiguous. There is care and respect, but we aren’t privy to their intimate world. Or perhaps Nandita finds respite in her world of fiction and nostalgia to fill a void in her life, therefore even her friendship with Rajeev (Biju Menon) is something that doesn’t come across as compelling. In Ramante Edenthottam, the woman had an abusive spouse as a reason to find refuge in Ram (Kunchacko Boban) but here, Rajeevan seems to have a good marriage. Though he casually patronises his wife, on the surface, they seem to be a regular happy couple.
Kamal is finicky about keeping the moral compass of the characters intact as he furnishes ‘honourable’ justifications for Rajeevan and Nandita to develop an attraction for each other. With Rajeevan though at times, it flounders as he is already half in love with her before she reveals their childhood connection, for Nandita, the thought only crosses her mind after she realises that he is that person of her childhood who held her hand when she needed it most. He is the metaphorical longing that she wrote about in her stories, a part of the missing jigsaw puzzle in her life which was stopping her from being truly happy. Here the closure is the way we envisage — without challenging morality and keeping the boundaries unharmed. When they meet again after ages, it’s yet again in the traditional space of their family.
In the recently released Pookkalam, the life of an aging couple who are nearly 100 years old, comes to a screeching halt when the husband discovers on their granddaughter’s engagement an old letter written to his wife nearly 50 years ago. The man files for a divorce. While the wife is apologetic, there is no clarity regarding the nature of the affair. We are told that the son’s death had turned the man into a drunkard, and the wife was left to take care of the family. It is during the lowest ebb of her life that she gets closer to her daughter’s teacher. But somehow, the wife’s trauma isn’t addressed. And those portions are sanitised and powdered with a whiff of feel-good, thereby diluting the profundity of such a heart-wrenching tale.
In cinema, romance is always adulterated with lust, guilt, and morality when it comes to narratives on infidelity. Often, the characters themselves have a better sense of right and wrong. It is also clear that there are very few films that have succeeded in portraying the various complexities of infidelity. In Idavazhiyile Poocha Mindapoocha for instance, the woman gets into an affair with a former lover when her husband is unable to fulfill her need, and she ends up being ostracised from her family. But in KG George’s Irakal, when the much-married sister has an affair with the man Friday, she isn’t judged but is shown to be as nefarious as her father and brother.
We have also had more stories involving cheating husbands than wives, and ironically, since time immemorial, stories on adultery have always let the men off by a large margin. They are forgiven and accepted back by the woman (Cocktail, Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback, Kattathey Kilikoodu, Chanchattam, Chandrettan Evideya). But the women rarely get a chance of redemption (Idavazhiyile Poocha Mindapoocha).
We have mostly kept it one-dimensional, and perhaps bringing more women writers on board will help in treating such stories with more nuance.
Neelima Menon has worked in the newspaper industry for more than a decade. She has covered Hindi and Malayalam cinema for The New Indian Express and has worked briefly with Silverscreen.in. She now writes exclusively about Malayalam cinema, contributing to Fullpicture.in and thenewsminute.com. She is known for her detailed and insightful features on misogyny and the lack of representation of women in Malayalam cinema.