*Spoilers ahead, only read if you’ve seen both the films /do not mind spoilers
Koozhangal / Pebbles streaming on SONYLiv
Kottukkaali / The Adamant Girl streaming on Prime Video
The first time I saw Koozhangal , I remember not speaking for a long time after watching it. In the night, the sound of a woman walking clouded my sleep. The film was a revelation of what is still possible in the medium of cinema, a question film students find themselves deeply embroiled in when going through history of cinema and watching numerous brilliant films.
The director PS Vinothraaj had walked barefoot in the scorching Madurai heat with his actors, shooting them with a magnetic distance that was somehow just right; not too less and not too much.
Koozhangal begins with a nest at the end of a thin stem, swaying slightly in the hot winds. We see the the village waking up, and the man (played by Karuththadaiyaan) who walks past everything in a speed not quite matching that of the time of the space he is in: this effortless setting of tone, milieu, character and story that the first time director achieved is no small feat.
still from Koozhangal (2021)
Unfolding beat by beat then in front of us is a story of the parched, blazing land; the sun reaching us through the screen. Every movement of the camera is free: a freedom that is rarely experienced by filmmakers and audiences of today. It has a will of its own, the film; although it exists inside the real-life incident the filmmaker experienced through his own sister- for reality is not film.
The camera in Koozhangal moves inside the bus, as men fight amongst each other, through their legs in an eerie silence till it reaches the exhausted woman with a child on her lap. The vacuum is broken with a crackle of the child’s voice as it begins to cry. Now I can theorise on the affect created here, through space, time and storytelling. But what is really remarkable is that this idea was conceived and meticulously executed without fear or the strangling of emotion into a symbolic gesture. A deity in one of the passenger’s lap rolls around.
still from Koozhangal (2021)
The girl who plays with the flowers is part of a lower caste family that is hunting rats to eat in the parched land by blowing smoke in the rat holes and driving the rats out. The man walks back instead of riding the bus when his son (played by Chellapandi), tired of his father’s antics tears the money and runs ahead. Now the man has to face his hunger, thirst and above all thoughts that he has avoided through speed of a bus, distractions like drinking alcohol and smoking a beedi. Slowly all the objects he surrounds himself with- matchbox, cash for bus ticket, alcohol: all of them are taken away by his small boy who gets beaten up for it.
Now, once the boy too is taken away by a teacher passing by on a scooter, the father has no choice. He must face the myth of the land, the power of the boiling heat and the wound he is to incur on his toe as he walks, and walks, and walks….
The son keeps a pebble in his mouth to keep himself from feeling thirsty. At home, he adds it to a pile of pebbles on the shelf: indicating this isn’t the first time his father picked him up from school to go and get his mother from the neighbouring village.
The father eats the cooked rice and sambhar in fistfuls. The film fades out slowly at a solemn scene: an elderly woman is taking out water from a muddy quarry slowly and filling her pots: there are at least four more women waiting to fill their pots with such a scant amount of water that it leaves your throat parched, but ever so lightly: never leaving that nest at the end of the thin stem in the opening shot. A strange and perhaps unconscious deconstruction of the crow-who-drops-pebbles-in-pot-of-less-water in the geography of Madurai.
The film leaves the audience with a meditation that will stay on within for days to come, if one lets it.
still from Koozhangal (2021)
I was following the marketing of Kottukaali for a long year. My Tamil friends casted doubt over the casting of Soori…the darkening of skin for Anna Ben.
Last night I finally watched it and found my heart sinking as soon as the 2nd scene of the film- when Anna Ben looks at the cockerel tied in the chain. So we are entrapping the film in symbolism, I thought to myself. Soori did not sit at all in the film. Why was I watching something I had already experienced when I visited Madurai?
Such painfully obvious screenplay tropes such as- a lot of excretions, a surprisingly violent fight (In Koozhangal the camera detaches, that detachment is a cinematic choice rather than a ‘reality’), a bull on the road….
The conversations were out of a situation one does not want to be in. Why shall I watch a film about people I avoid, especially without any cinematic interventions?
What is a realistic cinema is a questions asked since the days of Italian Neo-realism. Is cinema to be burdened with symbolism and real intermediately?
PS Vinothraaj copy-pasted every cinematic device of Koozhangal, mistaking them to be under his ownership- they were of the film, and came out of the environment the story created for itself. They are not yours to misuse.
In a hurry as if afraid someone else will use his ‘tricks’ (which they were not in Koozhangal but sadly are, in Kottukkaali)…he ended up trivialising his own work in this film.
A violent fear is what one feels after finishing this film. A shockingly bad way of portraying your own people, sure you have reasons to hate them, every group of people in this world is problematic, misogynistic etc…so why waste three years of your life and crores of money to make a film on them? Why spend time with them in your head?
In a time when we mostly see insufferable ‘content’ on screen, just having the gal to take slow shots and having it release in theatres is applauded. Such is the case with this film as well, that haunts any audience who had sliver of hope after watching Koozhangal/Pebbles.
To carry the burden of the discrimination one faces is another kind of discrimination. It is not your fault you were oppressed and it is definitely not your art work’s. Something to think about…
After going through hell, is an artist obliged to keep portraying that hell and representing it over and over again? The pressure of representation and capitalism combined in our age of ‘obvious marketing’. Marketing yourself is supposed to be such a natural thing to do that no one questions why do it?
Now as reviews pour in, PS Vinothraaj has successfully marketed himself as a ‘pioneer road movie’ filmmaker of Tamil cinema. A box has been created and enclosed. Will it ever open again?
still from Kottukkaali (2024)
The film takes on through the traumatic rituals that occur in a village. With a Tamil Nadu release you are showing your people the same trauma they live through everyday? Is that what cinema is for?
The way the mother is beaten up for birthing a girl child who went to college and educated herself. You think we don’t know this happens? Why archive it as if it has not been reported a hundred times?
Just how I lost my temper when I watched Vatrimaaran’s Viduthalai Part 1 (2023) and the scene is shown of a bunch of naked tribal women getting harassed by police men- you think we don’t know it happens?
And if you want reality, let me tell you, those women would fight back, even if they are losing.
Even in Kottukkaali, Pandi (played by Soori) would have been slapped and punched by someone from the girl’s side.
Instead, in the scene where Pandi is beating up the women, if you look at the scene carefully: the other characters are not holding him at all. They are letting him beat the women. Even if I invent a reasoning such as, ‘The girl’s family thinks they deserve the beating’ there is nothing in the film supporting this. In reality, Pandi would have been held back violently for no one wants an accidental murder and police involvement; a common occurrence and a legitimate fear.
The hair of women symbolising freedom- whether it is Anna Ben’s character Meena imagining herself walking freely with her hair let down or Soori’s character Pandi pulling women’s hair before beating them: a very shabbily written ‘metaphor’ that did not translate visually at all.
In the last scene, a Tamil girl is being molested by the ‘seer’ instead of Anna Ben. Why? A Malayalam superstar cannot be shown going through this?
Such a devastating choice, my heart goes out to the local Tamil viewers who were forced to confront yet again, something reality forcefully throws at them anyway, the sensitive ones whose memories regurgitated without consent. Such a violent, angry film that undoes what Koozhangal had started- a revolution in Tamil independent cinema.
Combining the worst traits of so-called independent and mainstream legacies of Tamil cinema, Kottukkaali presents a chronicle of linear images put together without even an iota of sensitivity so vividly enwrapping Koozhangal.
still from Kottukkaali (2024)
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