When a couple is caught kissing in the shadows, a bunch of gossipy men set out to “expose” the woman. What follows is a funny, smartly written comment on the things men do to women. That was the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Senna Hegde’s Avihitham opens with a quote. “They weigh us, measure us, and then decide our worth.” The author of this quote is simply named “She”, because this could have been written by any woman. The superb opening shot is a wide shot that covers the land and the sky with a moon. But over this stretch of nothingness, we hear a group of men drinking and talking trash about women. One of them refers to a woman named Rashmi whose husband caught her with their neighbour. In short, every “she” is a slut. (These men would use that word!) Another man says that instead of marriage, he’d rather have five hundred rupees for booze and a good night’s sleep. In short, every “he” in this village is a loser. The story gets going when one of these men takes a walk past the backyard of a house, a place thick with trees, and sees two people kissing in the dark.
The man is revealed soon enough, as he steps into the light. He is Vinod, who works at the flour mill. But who is the woman? Who is the “she”? The title translates to “an illicit affair”, and this could have been a heavy-duty, moral-science lesson of a drama about infidelity and loose tongues in a village. But Senna Hegde, who co-wrote the film with Ambareesh Kalathera, has crafted some kind of crazy comic thriller that runs just about an hour and forty minutes. Avihitham is the director’s fifth feature film, not counting the documentary that marked his debut. The highlight of Senna’s filmography is the brilliant Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam Avihitham isn’t as ambitious, but within its modest framework, it achieves everything that it sets out to do. Within the laidback rhythms of the storytelling, the beats are so precise that the film plays out in the classic three-act structure of a… heist movie.
Act 1 is the set-up, which establishes the “needs” of the men. In a regular heist movie, the need is money. Here, the need is that of idle minds to do some moral policing and expose women who stray. (In a funny-yet-sad state of events, the man who is part of this illicit relationship is apparently not worthy of being targeted.) Act 2 details the plotting and planning to catch the couple red-handed, which actually includes a map and a visual enactment of the scenarios being described. And this gets us ready for Act 3: the execution and the unexpected payoff. Will the woman – the “she” – turn out to be who they think she is? They think it is Nirmala, who lives with her daughter and mother-in-law while her husband is away at work in a different place. We know that it can’t be that easy, and we expect a twist. Even so, the identity of the “she” is unexpected, and it brings up a moving point about how women are often left alone in marriages, without someone to speak to or share their feelings with, while the husbands have a jolly good time with their drunk male friends.
Avihitham is a very funny movie. Some of the jokes make you laugh out loud: like the one about mysurpak, or the one about lip-reading, or the one with a mother’s sarcastic blessing. But much of the humour is in a softer tone. For instance, the man who discovers the illicit affair is someone who peeps into bathrooms where women bathe. We have a tailor who claims he can look at a woman’s chest and guess who she is, because he makes the blouses for everyone and he has all their measurements. There is a touch about a TV serial whose melodramatic twists and turns supposedly target women viewers, but the wild imagination of the men in this movie rivals the events of that megaserial. Avihitham has lots of charm and lots of laidback humour. The performances are as laidback as the proceedings, and there’s a special kind of happiness in seeing mostly non-famous actors. They really live the role. At a time of sensory overkill, it’s a pleasure to submit to a movie that knows exactly what it wants to do and does it very, very well.
