'Penn' to 'Navarasa': Tamil anthology films and how they've changed
With the much-hyped Navarasa all set to premiere on Netflix on August 6, it really seems to be raining Tamil anthologies in the COVID-era. The format isn’t recent but neither was it common. Suhasini Mani Ratnam’s Penn (1991) or Revathy’s Chinna Chinna Aasai (mid-'90s) are remembered fondly by many. Though they’d be better categorised purely on technical grounds as mini-series rather than anthologies (a collection of works by various directors), they no doubt prepared the audience for this form of storytelling.
Watching Penn now, I’m grappling with how to judge a work from 30 years ago. A female director told stories centering women. The stories addressed love, romance and streaks of individuality, but also were perhaps predictable. Even the attempts at realism (how a woman raised in the countryside may feel out of her depth in a big city) appear suspended in a world clear of class or caste as the director would like you to believe. Love Story and Vaarthai Thavari Vittai, the two shorts available on YouTube, leave one conflicted, yet drawn to aspects of the story. In the first, a young woman, Shobha (played by Shobana), is the formulaic anti-love women’s liberation “vaayaadi” who refuses the groom at the bride-viewing function, but ends up falling for him later. Subtext: she decides that her freedom be damned. I’ll set aside the question of why someone would think feminism is incompatible with romance, for now. The candid arrangement between the groom, Suresh (Raja) and Shobha to call off the wedding after they matter-of-factly state their mutual disinterest, though not novel now, still feels exceptional.
The rest of the tale, until its unsurprising ending ,leaves you wondering if this is supposed to serve as some parable that feminists will be doomed to loneliness unless they give up their politics for love.
In Vaarthai Thavari Vittai, Suhasini, also an actor in this particular short, offers a touching moment when she says “I love you” without much coyness to her newly-wed husband after initially being overwhelmed by her sudden marriage and displacement from a small village. But again, as a viewer, you’re uncomfortably wondering if it sanitises the act of getting a daughter married off without so much as a by-your-leave just to save the father’s “maanam”. The fact that she has to become a martyr to fill the narrative’s need for a tragic climax (she dies during childbirth) begs the question: can women just exist on screen without being robbed off their politics for love or made saints of? By extension, who on earth decided that women who assert their individuality even slightly either have to tragically die or be ineligible for satisfying love-lives?
Chinna Chinna Aasai would be hard-pressed to be categorised as an anthology, but it features on some lists, so we’ll go with a couple of examples from it. Pooja and Ganga show women who are unimpeachable in their actions. They’re long-suffering, saintly and beautiful by Tamil cinema’s myopic standards. To do the work justice, the namesake Ganga from that particular story, displays a certain amount of agency. All things considered, she’s only a part of a dream sequence in the misanthropic author’s (played by SPB) life—a figment of his imagination supposedly come alive in order to course-correct his choices. The high-point was when Ganga shames him saying “You sit in an AC room and think you write realistic stories about poor peoples’ lives”. Unlike the protagonists’ homes in Pooja, the author’s sprawling bungalow serves a purpose.
Sillu Karupatti (2019), directed by Halitha Shameem, that came out before COVID-19, changed the dynamics between OTT and film releases. The film is an example among others that anthologies often provide an uneven viewing experience. Kakka Kadi stood out in how it showed male insecurities, vulnerabilities in the face of a debilitating disease like testicular cancer. Manikandan’s portrayal of Mugilan’s frailties and strengths and Nivedhithaa Sathish’s refreshingly plain-spoken personality were the saving grace of the anthology. It was disappointing to see a gifted actor like Samuthirakani wasted in Hey Ammu—a plot that left one more unnerved by Alexa’s seemingly limitless powers than inspire any empathy for the loveless couple.
Fast-wording to the COVID-era anthologies, whether it’s Paava Kathaigal or Putham Puthu Kaalai (I confess I haven’t yet had the chance to watch Kutty Love Story that had a theatrical release), questionable representations persist.
The alienating socio-economic backgrounds in many of the segments left me impatient for the story to finish, despite recognising what it was that each director wanted to talk about.
Whether it was the Urvasi-Jayram starrer Ilamai Idho Idho or Aavnum Naanum, Avalum Naanum or Coffee Anyone? from Putham Pudhu Kaalai, they displayed Tamil lives utterly removed from the lives of the majority of the audience.
Coffee Anyone? brought back Suhasini Mani Ratnam as an actor and director. The class-location of the family apparent from the palatial home, and their caste-location obvious from the father warning his daughters not to add egg to the cake they were baking because “your mother can’t stand the smell” mars a tale of a family’s joyful reunion with someone they’d almost given up to an advanced health crisis.
Thangam, Love Panna Uttranum and Oor Iravu from Paava Kadhaigal sell a series of half-baked politics. Two out of the four stories from the anthology describe queer love, one of which overlaps with caste pride, the other with communalism. Both require martyrs again.
In Love Panna Uttranum, a daughter is murdered horrifically by electrocution for loving a lower-caste man. Stony Psyko who brings all his "gethu" to the screen in Kaala is largely reduced to comic relief in this segment. It’s hardly amusing to set up a scene in which a Dalit man from Dharavi is nearly murdered because he’s mistaken as the heroine’s lover. Kalki plays the befuddled white face of reason in this mad brown world of caste-madness. Finally, a father who murders his own daughter for caste is humanised, given redemption. The victims of that pride—better described by the Tamil term “veri”?—Forgotten. Erased.
Similarly, in Thangam, a trans woman has to be traumatised, violated and killed off. She has to be just a beatific enabler to cis-het love before she can be human. Maybe those who carry out the violence or are complicit aren’t forgiven until the end, but their despair when the son and daughter that Sathaar brought together shun them, feels cinematically designed to evoke empathy. These are, I have to state, only issues I point out as a cis-het woman about why a story by another cis woman made me uncomfortable.
Oor Iravu that also dealt with inter-caste love has faced criticism along the same lines. The camera spends excruciating minutes hovering over a woman’s murder for marrying “beneath her caste”, asks the audience to empathise with the father, despite his crime, by showing his shattered face though he himself poisoned his daughter.
Given that Karthik Subbaraj is one of the directors in Navarasa, I feel I must go back a few years to the double installment of Bench Talkies (the first installment came out in 2015) brought out under the director’s Stone Bench banner. Both also properly fit the definition of “anthologies” in the mix of directorial voices it brought together. While many of the films felt underwhelming, a couple merit mention.
Nalladhor Veenai that tried to start a conversation on the sexual assault of young boys may be a commendable step, but why did the story have to be set in a housing board colony? Madhu cheers on the frankly grating formula of the “good girl” who immediately accepts a man’s romantic overtures versus the “bad girl” who just may have other plans.
Not to single out Karthik Subbaraj from the other eight directors, but I feel considerable apprehension about how his segment Peace is going to play out. He has made his solidarity for the Eelam struggle clear from Iraivi to Jagame Thanthiram to the promotional material for Peace. In that context, his critique of the Sri Lankan state apparatus is also clear. On principle, while solidarity with the first and criticism of the second is sound, Karthik's films have the dissonance of an outsider failing to create an unproblematic intersection of storytelling and ally-ship. Neer, his short in Bench Talkies, overtly draws attention to the many incidents of Tamil fishermen shot and murdered by the Sri Lankan Navy or Coast Guard. Yet it’s Vijay Sethupathi’s character whose arrogance finds them in a situation in which they’re shot at. Is it really the lack of caution from fishing communities that leads to such continued offences by Sri Lanka, the last of it not a few days old?
What all nine segments in Navarasa have to offer we’ll see later today.
This is by no means a comprehensive list and it’s entirely possible many other films have been left out. Of those mentioned, these are aspects that stuck out and leave me wondering about the future of anthologies because the format is plainly here to stay.