Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's Vazhakk Is An Intriguing, Well-Acted Film

Director: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan

Cast: Tovino Thomas, Kani Kusruti, Sudev Nair

In the opening shot of Vazhakk/Quarrel, the latest film by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, the sky and the earth reach for each other, a cinematic gesture that has become a staple in the filmmaker’s works. A whimsical folding of the cosmos and the mundane into one unit. As the camera eventually takes a steep dive to the ground into a misty rainforest, we meet the mundane. Siddharthan (Tovino Thomas), a young lawyer, is in his car parked in a landscape partially eaten by the quarries, on a bitter phone call with Lakshmi, his ex-wife (voice of Kani Kusruti). 

The conversation reveals the details of a routine bad marriage, of a love that decayed and turned toxic over the years. The husband betrayed, deceived and abused, and the wife suffered. Lakshmi, who is always offscreen, is the custodian of the couple’s child, Thaara, who seems to be aware of the string of mistakes her father committed. In the next scene, Vazhakk pivots to another marriage story which appears to be shrouded in mysteries. 

Sanal does not present the film as a cause-effect tale but as one open to multiple interpretations or aggressive objections from the viewer. Although the broad strokes in the two marriage stories and the presence of Tovino Thomas and Sudev Nair, both mainstream movie stars whose allure, body language, diction and gestures are familiar to the local audience, place Vazhakk in an in-between space, it creates an illusion of accessibility. The viewer is inside and outside the film and at the threshold, all at once. 

S Durga and Ozhivu Divasathe Kali, Sanal’s most well-known works, were self-solving puzzles that did not ask the viewer to read between the images as everything was inscribed clearly in the narrative. But Vazhakk uses an elusive language. It carries forward the vestiges of Oraalppokkam and Kayattam, both character-driven abstract works. 

Trying to flee from his own life, Siddharthan drives his car into a rubber estate where he encounters a woman (Kani Kusruthi in a dual role), her mute daughter, and her violent husband Raghu (Azeez Nedumangad). Siddharthan, who is in the throes of his own volatile marriage, is thrown into the furnace of another one. Regardless of whether the second story is a distorted mirror image of the first one, it becomes a framework to reexamine the man. From the position of an abusive husband, Siddharthan switches to the role of a compassionate bystander. And at the tail end of a volatile scene, he momentarily slips into the skin of a lover. He draws sympathy from the viewer as someone who cannot separate one tender emotion from another. 

The story – the sequence of events on the screen – goes from baffling to absolutely bizarre. However, the viewer must not feel the pressure to unknot it. The pleasure lies elsewhere, in immersing oneself in the film’s evocation of the place, the fascinating blending of the characters’ brutal everyday reality with an even more terrifying supernatural, or the precision of performances and camera movements in the final sequence set inside the couple's home.

It is with a great ease Sanal merges the physical landscape with the surreal and Siddharthan’s clouded psyche. As soon as the phone call in the first scene ends, Chandru Selvaraj’s static camera wakes up and breathes a strange, wild energy into the narrative. The ground overturns and sometimes wobbles like an angry waterbody. When Siddharthan walks to the family’s humble house in a trench in the rubber plantation, the camera trails him cautiously as though they are entering a deadly trap. In another well-directed single shot in the woods close to nightfall, a stranger (Sudev Nair) arrives with his men and casually takes over the situation. A sense of foreboding hangs heavy in the air as the stranger's ghoulish presence cuts through the marital circus in the house. It is thoroughly gripping. 

The screenplay does not offer them a full-fledged personality, but the actors deliver fantastic performances. Tovino Thomas is no stranger to playing the flawed and vulnerable antihero, but here, he remarkably handles the challenge of long takes. Kani and Azeez deliver a charged performance as a couple trying to destroy each other and themselves verbally and physically. Sudev Nair, who gets to speak the least, evokes a quiet dread that makes one's blood curdle. 

The narrative opaqueness does not always yield pleasant results. Sanal does not flesh out the high concept and the characters, or probe into the man-woman relationship to come up with something he has never said before. One cannot possibly find a rationale as to why the woman in the film is a constant while the men are variables. She is the underdog, the victim in the story, and both the female characters are, inexplicably, played by the same actor. In the same breath, one could ask why the teenage girl in Chola and the Durga in S Durga refuse to speak or react to their situations. While Vazhakk reemphasises Sanal's commitment to not conform to mainstream filmmaking patterns, it exposes, once again, his refusal to break out from his pet zone.