Adoor Gopalakrishnan has made relatively few films during his around five-decade span as filmmaker. In 2016, he made Pinneyum (Once Again) in Malayalam. This, based on the true story of a criminal who was never caught was distanced from his in-depth approach to identity and the psyche of his protagonist. It did not get much positive reviews. Padayatra, the film he is now making, marks a decade of gap in his journey as one of the greatest living filmmakers in the country.

The film is inspired by a notorious 1980s Kerala crime involving insurance fraud, murder, and an attempt to fake a person's death. In 1984, a man, Sukumara Kurup. planned to fake his own death to claim a substantial insurance payout of Rs 50 lakh. Kurup and his accomplices (including family members) targeted a stranger named Chacko, who had asked for a lift near Karuvatta in the Alappuzha district. Chacko was strangled to death in a car. The perpetrators then burned the body and the vehicle, attempting to make it look as if Kurup had died in the incident. The case became one of Kerala's most famous, yet unresolved, criminal cases because the perpetrator (Kurup) did not resurface and the planned deception failed to work as intended because the dead body was identified as belonging to someone else.

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Once Again revolves around Purushottaman, married to Devi. They have a daughter, six, when the flashback begins. The problem is that Purushottamanis unemployed and lives off his wife’s meager earnings as a schoolteacher. Devi is the sole income earner in the family. Though he loves his wife dearly, his father-in-law does not approve of his living off his daughter’s earnings what with the burden of his mentally challenged son Kurup who is unable to work for a living.

“I interact with the medium of cinema by choosing a human being placed in a certain situation. It may be a village simpleton, a disillusioned political worker or a writer as the case may interest my creative instincts and me. It is their existential situation that my film explores. None of this can be summed up through a slogan," he adds. Adoor insistently refuses to reduce any of his narratives to a cause-and-effect confrontation between the lily-white and the pitch-black. In fact, in a very understated way, his films deal with human 'absences' and sometimes, small 'presences' that mark that vital difference between Adoor and other filmmakers. The long “absences” and final disappearance of Purushottamanfrom the lives of his wife, daughter and in-laws defines the content of this film.

In an intrinsic sense, one might seek parallels between Unni, the idle, selfish, ageing protagonist in Elipathayam and Purushottaman but that would be wrong because the time-frames the two films are set against are completely different. Through Unni, Adoor brilliantly deals with the tragedy of an idle, lotus-eating man who exemplifies selfishness, personal failure and subtle violence in a way that destroys the lives of not just himself but also those he lives with. Unni is perhaps the most unconventional protagonist one has encountered over the history of Indian cinema. Purushottaman is contemporary and reflects the negative values of greed, lust which sets him apart from Unni. Unni cannot even dream of working for a living as he is the last heir of a feudal family not used to working for a living. Purushottaman is a ‘today’ man and depending on a modestly earning wife is unthinkable.

Purushottam feels uncomfortable as a ghar jamai within his wife’s family and neighbourhood which looks down on him for his unemployed and dependent status. He whiles away his time reading detective thrillers. His wife loves him but is unhappy because he is unemployed and she is forced to bear the brunt of running the entire family. Finally, Purushottaman lands a job in Dubai and leaves. The story subtly suggests the selfish, laid-back approach of a man who is not bothered about the burden he imposes on his wife. He does send money, but his selfishness is evident if one were to look closely given Adoor’s touch of subtlety in all his films. However, in this film, the sharpness that hits you like a knife through the screen of soft visuals of a Kerala small-town in his other films is absent.

Purushottaman returns clandestinely after 17 years of absence, his identity transformed through plastic surgery, his name changed. But he has the gumption to suggest to his wife Devi to run away with him and begin a new life in a different place. The shocked wife can hardly recognize him because his absconding state has landed her father in prison where he refuses to meet his daughter and grand-daughter, and refuses parole. Devi’s maternal uncle died in prison and her brother Kutty, is completely bedridden following police torture. Purushottaman does not even realise that he is no longer the same Purushottaman who absconded as a murder suspect. It is a clear case of a loss of identity which makes him unrecognizable. It is therefore, strange that he expects his wife he had left for 17 long years will accept him. She does not.

Adoor's reluctance to identify himself with an ideology, his explorations of the individual, often, on a one-to-one basis that spans several layers of the human experience is quite evident in this film. What is not evident in Once Again is his portrayal of a spineless character who basically, is a parasite yet pretends to be something else. Adoor's technique is brilliant, the most striking of which is his power of understatement and his ability to resist all temptations of surrendering to intellectual pretensions. In fact, his cinema does not demand any inner readings because each film stands by itself superbly at face value. Understatement in craftsmanship is also one of the hallmarks of his films. Low-key natural lighting blends the characters into their rural milieu while the cinematography maintains the richness of the Kerala landscape without subjecting it ever to touristy, picture-perfect, postcard-like visual images.

Once Again spells out how smoothly and glibly a man’s greed for money can reduce him to a toxic, amoral human being without bearing an iota of guilt for diabolically planning the murder of an innocent man for the insurance money. The actual murder is something he does not have the guts to commit and makes Devi’s aged uncle to do the needful.

If you look closely, you discover that it is Devi (Kavya Madhavan) who stands out as the strongest human being in the entire story. Yet, she is no flag-raising or candle-light processionist woman. Nor does she seek a sympathetic shoulder to cry on including her grown daughter. Her strength – moral, emotional and physical – sustains her through the 25 years of a failed marriage to an unfeeling, greedy husband like Purushottaman(Dilip). Adoor’s insistence on the “absences” of certain characters is repeated in Once Again through the character of Purushottaman.

Her father (Nedumudi Venu), an honest, retired and popular school teacher too, bends to the pressures of the son-in-law to kill some stranger for his insurance money which never comes. Nedumudi Venu as usual, is at his best self as he always was, specially in Adoor’s and Aravindan’s films. Indrans as Devi’s brother Kuttan is brilliant in a strong, supporting role. M.J. Radhakrishnan’s cinematography is brilliant and so is the sound-mixing by N. Harikumar who aesthetically captures the subtle ambient sounds of the small town, even the soft knocks on the window of Devi’s bedroom, including Bijbal’s background musical score.

Adoor has never compromised with market pressures or audience demands for mainstream entertainment. Yet, he has held on to his own language, style, approach, story and plot and is a name to reckon with on the map of International Cinema. He has made relatively few films during his long span as filmmaker. His first film Swayamvaram (1972) came ten years after he graduated from the FTII, Pune. It was the second Malayalam film after Chemeen to have won the National Award. Followed Kodiyettam (1979), Elipathayam (1981), Mukhamukham (1984), Anantaram (1987), Mathilukal (1989), Vidheyan (1993), Kathapurushan (1995, Nizhalkuthu (2002), Naalu Pennugal (2007) and Oru Pennum Randaanum (2008).

Says Adoor, "Filmmaking is not just about story telling. That's a minor excuse, a simple but significant excuse to keep an audience engaged in a cinema theatre. I am making them experience and also look for things within and without themselves, and around themselves. I am talking about my kind of cinema. This, I think is the function of any art for that matter -- to make you aware, to make you think and disturb you positively and creatively, to make you excited about it, to make you responsive to things."

About Once Again, Adoor says, “The whole family gets entangled in the web of deceit and cannot be extricated, The father who has thus far been a model of human uprightness cannot but fabricate a story as an alibi. Devi, the daughter, a spotless character, cannot but tell a lie when the police questions her. The tragedy lies in our inadequacy to emerge from a deep, moral crisis.” But the apparently vulnerable Devi puts her foot firmly down and asks her husband to leave them for good. For her, “Once Again” does not exist.

If one were to look a bit closely at Adoor’s entire oeuvre, many of his films have dealt beautifully through the cinematic language he has devised for himself, that in most of his earlier films, Elipathayam (1981), Mukhamukham (1984), and Vidheyan (1993), his major male protagonists have not really shown characteristics of being strong and positive human beings.

His oeuvre explores the interconnectedness of human beings placed within different contexts, some sourced from literature and some springing from original ideas to unfold in layered ways, the struggle or lack of struggle in men and women within specific time-space paradigms. His cinema is unique because of his gift for understatement marked nevertheless by razor-sharp, scathing indictments on feudalism at its worst, patriarchal dominance, capitalistic exploitation sometimes dotted with a movement towards egalitarian thinking, an idealistic, democratic approach to life and emancipation.

© Mathrubhumi English