Shyamaprasad is more inclined towards literary adaptations on-screen (except for Ritu, the rest are all adaptations of published novels or plays). Artist, written by Shyamaprasad is an adaptation of Paritosh Uttam’s Dreams in Prussian Blue, and revolves around two Fine Art students who decide to live together.
Starring Fahadh Faasil and Ann Augustine, the film won multiple Kerala State Awards despite doing badly at the box-office. It ticks all the boxes of a typical Shyamaprasad film, including some stellar performances from the lead actors.
Michael Angelo (Fahadh is terrific, and at times we get glimpses of a controlled Shammi from Kumbalangi Nights) can only see the world through his canvas. The sky for him is a fusion of baby blue, ice blue and light blue, the plants are a splash of forest green, Kelly green and lime green and the sea is Pacific blue and aquamarine. Every waking hour is spent on prepping the walls and the room, staring longingly at the empty canvas and the possibility of washing it with warm colours. They consume his life, the images, the contours, the spacing, the blending, glazing and scumbling.
He can feel the superiority and fluidity of a fine brand of oil paint when it plops out of the tube, and blends with linseed oil. When he sits in a room, surrounded by humans, you can see that he has already displaced himself from that reality. He is cocky, egotistic and cannot fathom anything beyond the intricacies and vastness of the canvas and his creations.
Even his relationship with Gayathri (Ann Augustine who is brilliant), the new student at the Fine Arts college, begins with his obsession with paintings. A casual banter about art appreciation draws him towards her. He does not hide his conceit, wondering if she has an opinion at all? As their relationship progresses, you already know where it will lead to, the signs of doom are there. He is taken in by her of course. Maybe she reminds him of a new painting he just finished. The romance sparks around her query about doing portraits--“Shall I do a portrait of you? Like Picasso?” he asks, gently caressing her hands, sharing their first kiss, in the backdrop of his paintings.
The conversations we suspect are only about his paintings—when she tries to wipe the colours off his hands, he begs her to let it be (“I feel weird without colours on my hands”). At the clothes store, he dismisses her attempt to buy him a new shirt (“I can’t paint with wearing a branded shirt”). Gayathri in a way endorses every single quote ever written about a woman in love—she loves with abandon, she is angry with him for many things, but always sticks around. She loves more than she will ever get back and she knows it.
Or perhaps, she was merely in love with the idea of love. Even before they move in together, Michael has already emphasized their respective roles—he will paint, she will be the provider. When he casually declares that his father has refused to support him and therefore they have to shift to a new home, Gayathri tries to hide her nervousness. But Michael is unperturbed—"Can you find a new house? Do you have some money?” As she worked nights at a BPO, he tirelessly painted. But to be fair to Michael, he never gave her false assurances. Only Gayathri nursed hopes of a finding a new man after moving in. He never deterred from what he stood for.
Even before Michael loses his eyesight in an accident, their relationship had started to stagnate. His stubborn refusal to compromise and find a part time job puts the burden fully on Gayathri, making her helpless and frustrated in return. When she loses the job at the BPO centre, she is forced to work at a fast food joint. As she strained off French fries from the boiling pan, Michael would be at home, trying to find his way back to the world of paintings. Each time she came home, Michael would have inched his way to his goal, finding dimensions and spaces through his hands, feeling the canvas, and seeing it all in his mind’s eye.
In a strange way, the blindness never ceases his enthusiasm to paint, as he was always living in a parallel world, removed from reality. Only Gayathri was losing her zest in this abusive relationship, often confiding in a friend. He is so engrossed in the paintings that after a point Gayathri’s role eventually dilutes into what he first described, to that of a “a mere provider.”
If he is aware of her hectic schedule, her struggle to make ends meet, he gives no indication. Gayathri is so used to his attitude that when he demands expensive paints, instead of saying she cannot afford it, she promises to get it for him. That leads to her first (and last) deception in their relationship—irony considering even that is done to please him, as she is madly in love with him. When she replaces Prussian blue with all the colours, Michael has already planned a series of exhibitions in his mind. She looks on powerlessly as he concurrently paints multiple canvas—with the same Prussian blue. He talks about green meadows with cows grazing, people walking on the road and she nods. What is heart-breaking about the Gayathri-Michael affair is in how colossally selfless she is. Besides achingly young. And yet, Michael never saw anything beyond what he wanted to see—he coldly overlooked everything she did for him.
When the friend tried to make advances at her, she runs away and refuses to bulge despite him threatening to tell Michael about the Prussian blue lie. She would make excuses for him (“he has all the problems of a real artist”), thereby conveniently forgetting her own aborted career as a painter. In the end when Michael discovers the deception, he does what is expected of him—he pushes her away, shuts himself off everything thing she did for him and the cocky, egoistic painter takes over. But strangely as Gayathri walks away dejected, why do we get a feeling of elation instead?
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.