Visaranai: Saga of police brutality!

Visaranai, a Tamil film that was released in the beginning of this year, is the official entry from India for the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Whether the film will eventually be shortlisted for the award is anyone’s guess. However, one cannot discredit the effect the film will have on the audience in depicting the state of affairs in our police system. It is interesting that despite the film being a statement against the State machinery, it went on to win the national award last year. This suggests that the State is open to critique itself which is a positive sign.  

Director: Vetrimaaran

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The film is based on the novel Lock Up by M. Chandrakumar. It narrates how four labourers are wrongly implicated by the police in a high profile robbery case in which they are under immense pressure to find the culprits. However, things dramatically change when the four labourers are saved by a Good Samaritan. But, as fate would have it, the Samaritan himself eventually traps them into committing more crimes and thus leads them into doom in the quagmire of corrupt nexus among the police the bureaucracy, and the political establishment.

The film is made in utmost simplicity sans any superfluous embellishments. However, the precise narration and editing help in putting across the narrative quite matter-of-factly. The entrails of the police system are exposed in such a way that no one will argue that our police system works any better than that. The betrayal and the violence that emerge at tandem make the film gory in parts, but when one considers the overall objective of the film, one cannot see the film otherwise. The police system in India has its own complexities and pressures. The long desired police reforms are yet to see the light of day. Till then films like Visaranai will have a field day in exposing it threadbare. 

- Melwyn Pinto SJ

Sairat: Love in the time of family honour

Nagaj Manjule, the celebrated directed of the cult Marathi film Fandry has come out with yet another compelling tale in Sairat. The film is very important for our times, especially where caste and creed take priority over blood relations; where humanity is sacrificed on the altar of so called family honour and pride.

Director: Nagraj Manjule

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The film is a suave narration of love story between a boy (Parshya) from a poor family and a girl (Archi) from the upper echelons. As expected, it is a love tale that cannot be! And hence all the drama has to unfold. As the narrative proceeds, though, there seems to be a semblance of normalcy appearing, and yet what seems to win at the end is the tragic ‘family honour’.

The whole film is a realistic scripting of what seems to happen in many parts of Indian conservative societies. It is not making undue overt statements either. The characters in the film are the next door neighbours going about their daily routine. However, things take a serious turn when what seems normal is ‘shattered’ by the unusual love tale.

This is indeed an important film for our time – a time which has developed so much scientifically and technologically and yet backward in its reasoning and attitudes to life. Not just for the narrative it unfolds, but for the boldness it exhibits in presenting the day to day events in all its beauty and rawness. In fact, this film has the potential to both entertain and shock, placing before us the limitless passions – both positive and negative – at work among humans. The young new actors – deserve plaudits for the life they have added to the narrative.

- Melwyn Pinto SJ