The village-based protagonist does not wear a blouse. Is that such a sin? That’s the issue raised by this powerful drama, which premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024, and played at the recent International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK).
Geetha Kailasam gets the role of a lifetime as the protagonist of Angammal, written and directed by Vipin Radhakrishnan. This widow, originally conceived by Perumal Murugan in a short story, is quite a character. She has two sons but she also makes her own living, delivering milk on her moped. She smokes. She swears. She is set in her ways. She picks fights with her meek daughter-in-law, which suggests there’s a bit of a bully inside her. She has a crush on a man who looks a little older than her, but is terrified to reciprocate her affectionate glances. This amuses her. There’s a lovely scene where Angammal readies herself in front of a mirror, and when she’s done, she carefully twirls a few strands of hair over her ears. She wants to look good, and she does. She wears her sari without a blouse, and at least one reason may be the tattoo on her upper arm, which might get hidden if she wore that blouse. At least, that’s what she tells her granddaughter, the only member of the family she truly loves.
Women characters on the Tamil screen can get no stronger than Angammal, and male characters can get no weaker. Her older son Sudalai (Bharani) plays the nagaswaramn, especially when emotionally disturbed. He reminded me of the mute older son in K Balachander’s Unnal Mudiyum Thambi, who expressed himself through the same instrument and lived under the thumb of a similarly dominating parent. Sudalai likes to drink, and in a lovely writing touch, there’s a mention about his past that is given to us casually, quite late into the movie. In other words, we keep learning about these characters as we go along, as opposed to the characters being established in one exposition dump. Much later, we learn that Sudalai resents his mother because she chose to educate his brother while making him work. This younger brother, named Pavalam and played by Saran, is the motor that gets the movie going.
His education has made him a doctor, an “English doctor” as Angammal calls him. He is seeing a posh, rich girl named Jasmine (Mullai Arasi), and some of her poshness and richness seem to have rubbed off on him. Jasmine is very grounded, and Mullai Arasi plays her with a great deal of compassion. This is not the caricature of a rich girl we get in our cinema. Jasmine knows she is rich, but she carries that knowledge lightly, as though this were just another facet of her, like the fact that she’s Christian. But after moving away from his village, his roots, after getting exposed to “civilisation”, Pavalam is filled with resentment. He resents the way, for instance, his mother asks him to check on an ailing person in the village. “You all see me as a doctor. I can’t be free anymore,” he says. Rather, he pouts.
But Pavalam’s main issue is his mother’s blouseless-ness. He is ashamed that Angammal dresses this way, when the rest of the village seems to have moved on. The older women have begun to wear blouses and the younger ones talk about wearing salwar-kameez-es. In other words, they, too, have begun to conform to “civilisation”. Pavalam’s obsession with this issue is more acute because he does not want his girlfriend’s posh, rich family to see his mother this way. He does not want them to see her betel nut-stained teeth. He does not want them to see her swear or smoke or… Some of the villagers agree. “Veliyoor lendhu vandhu paatha thappa nenachupanga,” they say, that outsiders will take offence to such behaviour. “Kaalathukku etha maari maaranum…,” they add. You should change yourself according to the changing times.
But Angammal does not want to change. There is a shot of her young granddaughter trying out a smoke, no doubt influenced by her grandmother – but again, the director treats this delicately, without making Angammal a sinner. And neither is she a saint, even though she does want to make Pavalam happy. Angammal just wants to be who she is, who she has always been – and this becomes the crux of the film’s politics. “Why can’t we be ourselves?” She understands that the world is changing – at times, right in front of her eyes. Angammal named her granddaughter Periyanayagi, but the girl’s mother changed the name to the less old-fashioned “Manju”. Is Angammal being stubborn and headstrong, like the others think? Is she just a free spirit asking others to let her be as she is? Is her refusal to wear a blouse an “ooru vishayam” or a “sondha vishayam”? That is, is this a personal issue or something that affects the community?
As Angammal, Geetha Kailasam is phenomenal. The actor has been working her way through a series of mother roles in Tamil cinema, but nothing she has done so far prepares you for her vanity-free performance here, the way she makes Angammal a symbol of independence as well as a pain in the wrong place. Many viewers may be reminded of older people in our own homes, who do things that we are annoyed or ashamed by. At the same time, the director is careful not to demonise Pavalam. He is not a bad son. He is just someone who wants things a certain way, and who among us can fault him for that? But note that before he was “English educated,” this issue did not bother him. It’s the exposure to towns and cities that made him ashamed of his roots.
Angammal is based on a serious subject – the fiery interval point is a stunner, as is the look on Geetha Kailasam’s face. But the screenplay includes many funny situations and dialogues – rarely has talk about breasts been so normalised in a movie. The staging is basic but clean, and the period is established through minimal means, like the use of cassette tapes. There is only one bit that I wondered about, towards the end: it involves a small twist about a photograph. Was this necessary? But later, there’s a segment of magical realism that stunningly shows us the death of a way of life. I liked that Angammal, in her own way, got to live the way she did. At many points, she shuts up in order to please her children, but she is too strong and too individualistic to be that way forever. Whether you think the ending is happy or sad, it grants this woman the greatest of gifts: it lets her be herself.
