A year after my first viewing, it is today that I watched this film again. Everytime I watch it, a pain reveals itself on the surface the film is playing on, the music underlining this unbearable feeling, and there is hardly any use fighting it.
One must give into it.
Balu walks on peripheries.
Of madness. Of life itself. Of his house. Of land and water. Of shallowness and depth.
His poetry confirms this in various ways, one of it being:
"The divine skylark sings no more,
and the listeners have spread out and left,
Downed by summer, shaking in the heart
the heroine's sadness
only the sadness remains"
Balu closes his eyes in the mad house and wakes up in his memories. Only because he was young, it all seemed to be tied together. He had a hunch it was just an illusion but only when forms of people and the world around him began to mutate, to spread out did he realise that his will to not participate at the centre of action: be it communist revolution, the capitalist world where careers are made or his own place of dwelling- is a very political stance.
He has what he never asked for and when he got used to them, they evaporated into thin air, his father, his friend's dreams, his girl friend's friendship. The camera reveals its analog nature when it pans the sky as the couple sit together on the beach in silhouette, the landscape a painting except people are moving on it.
The grains of the film look back at the spectator from the sky, never from the water, the texture's presence and absence perhaps a byproduct of the restoration process, nevertheless creates a new feeling.
G Aravindan's Kanchana Sita has already been made by the time Pokkuveyil is being shot, and it enters through the forest and lyrics of Balu's poetry-music. His revolutionary friend almost invites him to the revolution multiple times but is usually at a loss after saying 'We need poets and artists like you."
"Tell me what I can do?" and there is no answer for Balu.
This is an extremely detailed view of the political apparatus at play in Kerala then, do communists really need the artists on their side?
The girl is moving at a much faster speed, and so it is natural that she disappears into the world, keeping up pace with her father and his capitalist aspirations.
Every political ideology seems to gift Balu one plunge and then another into loneliness and despair, for his refusal to participate is not just natural to him but is also taken for granted by those around him.
His friend who played basketball and dreamed of flying in the skies like the bird, was a victim of the speed of his dreams and his new bike, he broke his leg and his career prospects vanished in a moment. Balu walks the periphery of the basketball court- when it was a space for his friend's great glory, and when it was empty of human beings but populated by dry fallen leaves- the twilight of seasons, autumn, had befell Balu's world.
And all he can do is walk. Against the blur of green leaves that swirl into focus as he exits the frame, through the muddy terrain his feet have walked ever since he was a child, on the solid stairs his father would sit and feed the monkeys before he fainted to never get up ever again.
Balu does not just mourn death, he grapples with absences of familiar images that were actually there only that time he experienced them, and will never conjure up this way anywhere again except for in his mind and dreams.
Boats without boatmen on the familiar moving water. But what are human made objects without the humans who build or use them? Floating away aimlessly, it is a maddening site for Balu, who is not seen sketching after his intense drawing stint on the day his father passed out in the heat.
He uses just one pen, perhaps it is a common ball pen with dark blue ink, to meticulously and obsessively draw dark forms of birds and faces.
The forest and the sky mutates as it has always since his childhood, but now he is on shaky ground since that is not the case with the other elements of his life. He is after all a 19 year old college student, whose father could not afford to pay the fees due to his ideological commitments, as apparent in a dialog exchange early on in the film.
Thus the water is on fire. But he is not insane to experience that, as climate change sets in and all of us watch the temperatures soar every summer, he was perhaps intuitively foreseeing the coming future.
This text tries and fails to articulate the moments of this film, which immediately underscores the urgency of this film to exist. For some reason, both times I watched it, I had read a specific Hindi text just before the viewing, which affects how I perceive mediums and their respective potential and limitations.
Balu needs the evenings. He requires twilight more than the people around him. The night and day would gulp each other, consume each other if it was not for twilight. Balu is played by Balachandran Chullikkad, a poet, whose own poetry guides us through the film. He sings of Joseph and to Sita, the sound of his voice enveloping the entire film like the eye of a tornado: it has a strong presence and an even deeper absence once the film is over.
The geography breathes with Balu as he runs away in his dreams from a built man holding a large pot with smoke coming out of it, running quote fast for his position; and then Balu's sweaty face is revealed, it is perhaps a hallucination. He is at last leaving the periphery and pushing himself deeper, which would prompt his mother to drop him at the institution where the film initially began.
His mother cries when Balu pulls the tape out from cassette and wears it like a garland. A funeral for analog systems, for his last bit of sanity, and an apology to his mother who can cry her own insanity away unlike him. She looks at him, and we wonder, are women like her even allowed to pursue a certain madness?
The film is a circle that does not close itself without a difference, that difference is a gap, a monad of impossible possibilities, of grief, pain, time and space that we, the audience now carry with us, as the final credits roll.
I am moved to find just how much this film has affected me this entire year, finding drawings and words I etched for it over the last 10 months, it all culminates here and now.
Watch the film here-
in silence, with love & loneliness:
Yorumlar