2024, Malayalam, Amazon Prime, 7.7/10 IMDB, Directed by Christo Tomy
Published in Baradwaj Rangan’s Blog.
https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2024/08/09/readers-write-in-716-ullozhukku-a-halo-shatterer/
Engulfed by a sinister aura, this beautifully narrated drama, surfaces the buried emotions of two women, only to align their moralities eventually. The leading ladies ‘grieve their grievances’ through intense, ‘layered performance’, and we audience find ourselves becoming ‘agony aunts’, comforting the onscreen-duo.
Director Christo’s premise is straight from a chapter of his personal life, as he had acknowledged in an interview – ‘lashing monsoon preventing the burial of his family member’. The gloomy tonality of the premise is constant but with every moving frame, one is drawn closer to story and the lead characters, Leelamma Ammachi played by the terrific Urvasi and her daughter in law Anju, played by the striking Parvathy Thiruvothu.
The minimalism in the story line, ironically translates a challenging production design. While a low-lying area, that stagnates water from the heavy down pour for days together, is the premise, the crux is that the stagnation prevents a burial ritual. The timing of the OTT release, works in favor of the makers, as it is in perfect sync with the aftermath of a disaster in the state, a reality check, that sets the mood right making the viewers resonate with the ground reality. Camera gazes the water stagnated cemetery, and the tombs narrates a ‘non-welcoming’ story of their own on ‘climate crisis’.
Director Chirsto’s narrative style is crisp and his shot divisions are befitting. The frames are definitive and sequences, precise. Anju is in love with a man, but her wedding photo shoot camera angle, captures a different person, walking in to the frame. The circumstances are dealt with later, and the director chooses to do it only when the time is right. Similar are many disentangling situations in the story, and Christo aces narrating each one of those plot points at the right time.
The sequence, Leelamma, her sick son Thomaskutty and her daughter-in-law Anju at the doctor’s out-patient department, doesn’t reveal much. But a hunch is sowed when Leela askes Anju to fetch medicines, just when the mom and son enter the consultation room alone, while Thomaskutty looks Anju walking away, with guilt-stricken eyes. . I was reminded of one of my husband’s patients who was diagnosed with Chronic Ulcerative Colitis. He was accompanied every time by his parents, and his newly married wife was asked politely to wait outside, until one day the wife walked in alone with her parents, to know more about her husband’s ailment.
Coincidentally, both in the movie and in reality, the wives nursed their husbands, through the ailment and hospitalization, irrespective of her physical detachment in the case of Anju in the movie. The wealthy parents of the girl in reality, were concerned about their young daughter’s life, as she was fraudulently married to a sick man, but in the movie, the director’s sub plot tell a heart wrenching tale, about the ‘not so wealthy’ parents of Anju, in a revelation later.
The screenplay catches us unaware by breaking familiar patterns. The scenes overlap beautifully, moving the story forward by revealing vital plot points unassumingly without any pomp and the editor Kiran Das deserves a mention. Anju in her forceful marriage’s ‘almost consensus’ consummation, indicates she had ‘moved on’. She is haloed, when she cares for her sick husband. But her intimate indifference, instantly trails us to the phone call from a saved number in the name of a ‘girl’ and her meeting her lover accidentally in the pharmacy during her husband’s hospital visit.
The genuity in the care she provides to her sick husband, a striking contrast to her illicit affair, are quite illustrative of her two facets and the viewers are left in dilemma whether to be judgemental of her. Leelamma, learning about Anju’s pregnancy was another shot that catches Anju and the viewers off guard, and it happens so organically. Similar are the instances when the family’s wooden cradle climbing down the loft even with the backdrop of a delayed funeral, and it climbing back to the loft again as soon as Leelamma second guesses the father of the child, after a hearing a male voice from Anju’s female friend’s number.
Halos keeps shattering, Leelamma’s, for maintaining secrecy about her son’s health and then shatters Anju’s mom’s, who confesses, that it was her who kept the secret from the family about the groom’s illness, so that her daughter would be married into a big family. But when the final halo shatters off Anju’s lover Rajeev, her final decision, though predictable, is heart-warming.
The lead ladies seemed to have devoured their respective composite characters. Both their acts nudge the audience, to morally evaluate their deeds and the repercussions there after, but the distress these beautiful ladies had to undergo in their personal lives, all in the name of societal pressures, restricts us from calling them out as fraudster or a cheat.
Both their halos do ‘mend’ with their final choice and acceptance, to be a family, discarding societal norms. While the maker surfaces the intangible distress in women around us, by narrating the stories of these two women, he also addresses the role of parents in shaping these helpless women’s lives.
After a bout of illness of her son’s, Leelamma talks to Anju about her unfulfilled medical college dream in spite of her good marks, compromised for an early marriage and child birth. A mother regretting not to have pursued her studies, when her adult married son is sick, is a poetic representation of the helpless plight of women who are sabotaged in the name of societal pressures.
Leelamma claims, ‘God is jealous of her happiness’ and later Anju confronts her mother-in-law, when the two exchange dialogues in front of the freezer box. Anju’s spuing sadistic remarks, that Leelamma’s life was nothing to be jealous of, makes Leelamma realise that her life had been a sunken ship all along. Likewise, Leelmma’s courteous words while defending Anju from her accusing daughter, by acknowledging Anju’s loving care in nursing Thomaskutty, in fact influences Anju to turn her choice around, in the climax.
The superficial bond between these two women blossoms into a mom-daughter relationship and then into companionship. The transition only reflects their innate positives and humaneness. Was fondly recollecting Director K Balachander’s 1977 movie ‘Avargal’, for the estranged mother of Ramanathan, was ‘Leelavathi’ and the wife’s name was ‘Anu’- a coincidental rhyme to the names ‘Leelamma and Anju’ and their choices in the climax.