Few people know this, but for an intimidatingly cerebral man, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is capable of withering wit, usually delivered with a mild face. Great Day , his first film as a trainee at the FTII, was, in fact, a kooky comedy involving a difficult father and a prospective son-in-law with shiny teeth.

It is now 50 years since Great Day and Gopalakrishnan’s wry sense of humour is still intact. He is being felicitated at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts for this and a couple of other reasons. A painstakingly made three-hour documentary on Adoor, Bhoomiyil Chuvadurachu (Feet on the Ground) is being screened. He has also turned 75 this year. Altogether, an occasion that is rich with possibilities for chief guest PJ Kurien to lay it on thick when called to facilitate the director.

The allegorical Ellipathayam (The Rat Trap), Kurien admits artlessly enough, didn’t really grab him the first time he saw it. But once the global noise around the film grew, he gave it another shot. “That time, I realised what a great filmmaker he is,” he says. “I also want to congratulate for turning 75 this year.” Gopalakrishnan takes most compliments with quiet modesty. “But I didn’t really do much to turn 75. It was just biology,” he points out.

He is in the news for another reason, a not-so-flattering one. His latest work, Pinneyum (Again), opened in Kerala in mid-August. Unusually for the auteur, who has won either a state or national award for almost every film he has made, Pinneyum drew a barrage of flak. Some of it was pretty vicious and came on social media. But Gopalakrishnan is unperturbed, supremely sanguine about his own craftsmanship. In Delhi, he is still the toast of soirées. He is the chairman of the Public Services Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), and at a dinner hosted by TV producer and trustee Rajiv Mehrotra to celebrate the documentary film festival Open Frame, it is difficult to prise him away from admirers.

Gopalakrishnan admits, in his biography by Gautam Bhaskaran, that he is a “reluctant talker”. And he really is. Getting him to open up is rather like pulling out teeth, but he is in the midst of friends and in an expansive mood. He doesn’t flinch from any question and very often an unexpectedly impish smile lights up his face.

A glass of wine down the hatch and another being nursed, Adoor dismisses the hammering his film got from critics and old faithfuls. “I get bored repeating myself. Why would I do what I have already done? The problem is that people watch my older films and are upset when they see that I am not doing what they expect me to,” he says.

Does he think he is a misfit in the new world of Malayalam cinema packed with smart young directors and their crackling crisp films told with great technical chutzpah? “No, why?” he asks, surprised. “I am absolutely in touch with new technology, sound, editing. Pinneyum was my first digital film. Of course I was wary of the new medium, so I studied it first. But my approach to cinema remains the same.”

While the space for Adoorian cinema (a great term coined by film writer Parthajit Baruah in his book on the subject) has shrunk sharply over the last decade, the film business itself changed enough to ensure much greater visibility for Gopalakrishnan’s later releases. He is acutely aware of the irony. “ Pinneyum has been my biggest release. It opened in 75 cinemas and a subtitled version was released across the country. When Swayamwaram was released in 1972, it must have played in 13 or 14 cinemas in Kerala and just two cities outside, Bengaluru and Chennai,” he points out.

When Swayamwaram was released, it had left audiences stunned. What was this film about? As Adoor points out in Bhoomiyil Chuvadurachu , people hated that they couldn’t figure it out within the first 10 minutes, that the characters and the story weren’t laid down flat before them — who they were, what their problems are, where they were going, and who the villain was. Worse, there were no dialogues to begin with as the lead actors Madhu and Sharada travel in a bus, freshly eloped, as you later realise. Of course, the story ends in a disaster, there are no jobs in the market and the couple struggle to keep the elation of their rebellion going. There is sickness and death and, finally, a single mother with a small baby in a tiny room.

The film shook up all norms of filmmaking and existing narratives; only the stars were familiar. The early ’70s was a time when parallel cinema was gathering strength. In Kerala itself, Gopalakrishnan made for an indie triumvirate with G Aravindan and John Abraham. Elsewhere Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, the Girishes (Karnad and Kasaravalli) and many others were pushing cinematic boundaries.

Thanks in large part to Doordarshan, many of these films found a wide viewership too. Not many who lived through the late ’70s and ’80s will forget the Sunday afternoons devoted to off-beat regional cinema, slow, stylised and very deliberate, stuff many cinemagoers could not digest so easily.

Swayamvaram pioneered the new wave in Kerala. Today, some of the cinematic techniques used in the film may seem dated but at the time, they revolutionised the very approach to cinema. Some critics see Pinneyum , with its story of a couple’s struggle with deprivation, as a sort of Swayamwaram redux.

“It will always be a contemporary film. It is still relevant, you still have people flailing to live life on their own terms, you still have to deal with unemployment and hypocrisy,” says Vipin Vijay, the maker of Bhoomiyil Chuvadurachu , a fervent admirer of Gopalakrishnan and protégé as well.

By the time Elipathayam arrived on the scene, cited as his best by most, the Gopalakrishnan stamp had become unmistakable. The film is about the slow rot corroding Kerala’s feudal families ( kshayicha tharavadu , as it is beautifully described in Malayalam, ‘a clan wasted by consumption’). It lent itself to a certain stupor, which compounded with Adoor’s own pace, lent the film a surreal, comatose air. The long silences were punctuated only by the protagonist Unni’s summons to his long-suffering sister: “Rajamme! Rajammo!” (The call became an insider joke for many who were allergic to parallel cinema).

There is an iconic scene in the film — also included in the documentary — where Unni yanks a single grey hair from his moustache and then realises that it is black as he holds it up to light. The lethargy in the shot was enough to make you the viewer slump in empathy. You don’t just see a grand house falling apart, you can feel in your bones the damp in its walls. The films that followed, Mukhamukham and Anantharam , are probably the toughest of his works to watch.

Gopalakrishnan has expectations of his audiences; he wants you to make an effort to reach out and appreciate. He isn’t willing to be pinned down to simple storytelling. In Delhi he has just finished addressing a gathering of Malayalees, none of whom have watched Pinneyum though the film has been around for a week. “People have to make an effort to find films, you know,” he says.

Vijay says Gopalakrishnan’s greatest works are experiential — dream, reality and imagination merging. The filmmaker agrees. “Films are about experiences, about summoning them through memories and finally putting an emotional face to them. My films are about my cinematic culture, my life, my relationships,” he says in the documentary. “Everyone hears the same lines, watches the same scene but what you make of it depends on your life experiences, wisdom, maturity. Great art is about transcending the obvious, going beyond, it has to be felt and understood at many levels,” he says.

Kodiyettam ’s Sankarankutty is probably his most universally loved character in a coming-of-age film. He is the village simpleton; not, the director insists, an idiot, just a guileless, pure soul who goes with the flow. The film ran for two months at a stretch in Kottayam, a big deal in Malayalam films. Fans even today continue to post priceless scenes of Sankarankutty’s artlessness on YouTube.

It is still Gopalakrishnan’s older films that are talked about the most. Critic CS Venkiteswaran says that his films were widely discussed and debated when they were released. But the world where this happened is dying, if not dead. “That was a time when you went and saw award-winning films. There were literary circles, campus film societies, all kinds of alternative public spheres that nurtured the alternative film subculture. Now it is difficult to demand another kind of attention from audiences, they only want one thing,” he says.

Gopalakrishnan himself remains vastly unimpressed with the smart set that rules Malayalam films today. “What are they doing that is new? Everything moves like this — whoooosh. So, okay, where they once ran around trees they now run around mountains, in helicopters. Is that change? Do they know cinema, study it, understand it?” The question, of course, was only rhetorical.

Recurring features

Gopalakrishnan’s films are drawn from his world, his childhood, Kerala’s society and its politics. Vipin Vijay’s film Bhoomiyil Chuvadurachu throws up some insights into these connections:

Slices of Adoor’s childhood make their way into many of his films

References to his most traumatising encounters with death, early in life, have found their way to the screen. He recalls, as a young boy, mindlessly throwing a stone at an owl on a tree, watching it fall to its death with horror and forever regretting it. In Kathapurushan, little Kunjunni demands that his minder get him a bird from the trees and is gently rebuffed. As a very young boy, Gopalakrishnan recalls being woken up for a boat ride across the dark, dank backwaters to attend a funeral, and being riveted by the sight of wicks in coconut shell halves kept burning around the body. This memory, the tyranny of early years in school and memories of being a backbencher, all make their way into Kathapurushan. In later years, Gopalakrishnan recalls, he worked at becoming a class genius like the insufferably bookish teenaged Ajayan in Anantaram.

Food plays a big role

Several of Adoor’s films have long shots of men hungrily wolfing down large quantities of food, fistfuls of rice and curry balled up and noisily swallowed, with women serving and watching. Kodiyettam has more than one of its most memorable scenes set around a meal, as does Naalu Pennungal, and in Vidheyan the sharing of food marks a change in the plot. Adoor says food marks the progression in his characters’ lives and his connection with his family, the rest of society and world at large.

‘Culture’ has no place in his films

Gopalakrishnan has made acclaimed documentaries on Kerala’s performing and ritual arts — Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Krishnanattom and, most notably, Koodiyattom. His seminal work on Koodiyattom is one of the factors that got the art form its UNESCO tag as a priceless heritage. His family patronised Kathakali artistes, too, and he grew up watching the masters on stage. But he studiously avoids featuring these arts in his feature films. “They are a part of my life and their spirit informs my filmmaking, but I will never transport them bodily to my films just to add colour and make them saleable. There are others who do it, I don’t,” he says, and if you know your alternative Malayalam cinema you will get the jibe.

Men and their struggle with masculinity

Quite a few of Adoor’s male protagonists struggle with the roles assigned to them by patriarchy. The extreme case of this is, of course, Ellipathayam’s Unni forced into the role of the family’s head, but with neither the courage nor the energy to take control. Kodiyettam’s Sankarankutty is considered a loser precisely because he is happy not to become a ‘man’. Ajayan in Anantaram deals with similar conflicts. The women, in fact, are far stronger characters forced into silence.

Malini Nair is a Delhi-based journalist

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