‘Poem of the Wind’ review: The Tamil indie makes an Agam-Puram probe into masculinity

Sanjay K as Bharani in a still from Ramakaushalyan Ramakrishnan's debut feature 'Poem of the Wind'.

“there’s a bluebird in my heart that/wants to get out/but I’m too tough for him/I say, stay in there, I’m not going/to let anybody see/you”

Charles Bukowski’s poem Bluebird becomes an entry point for director Ramakaushalyan Ramakrishnan to turn the gaze inwards and probe masculinity and the fissures in its socially ascribed role in his debut feature film Poem of the Wind, which premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) earlier this month.

The first frame opens in an aerial shot on to the vast blue expanse of a restless river, in the backdrop is a voice narrating a story of the tragic fate of a beautiful bluebird being attacked by birds of prey. Next, a little boy is washed ashore, like a lone feather being carried by the river’s currents. As the film unfolds, the languorous shots will be an extension of the protagonist’s meandering thoughts. This feature film is an extension of an idea that the director first toyed with in his short film Shivanum Mohiniyum (on YouTube/MUBI), in which we are told that Lord Ayyappan was the child of Hindu god Shiva and Mohini, and Mohini being the feminine form of Hindu god Vishnu. Ramakrishnan's features, which has the same lead actor, greatly dwells upon the weight of gender manufacturing.

A still from 'Poem of the Wind'.

Poem of the Wind centres Bharani (Pranav Venkatesh), an emerging theatre artist, and scenes from his life, from his boyhood days of ingrained notions of the masculine to an adult man undoing that learning (playing a woman’s role on stage and also empathising with them whose self-expressions are repressed), to an aged man spiralling into nadir with the regrets of not resisting earlier when he could have. This is not a coming-out story. Here is a heterosexual man questioning heteronormativity and muscular politics. That probe happens with his silence. The person he’s within is at odds with the façade he needs to put up for the world out there. The unsaid builds an unbearable, restless, tormenting insurmountable sadness builds to and helplessness because of a piled-up weight of all that remained unsaid crushing him from within.

The young director, all of 21, has shorn the film of a narrative structure. The scenes are episodic moments from the protagonist’s life and emotional maelstrom – coloured since childhood, he embarks on a journey of unlearning and holding on to his own truth even as he’s pitted against an unrelenting, take-no-prisoners, hostile world of men and the masculine around him. When young, his sister questioned him why can’t men cry and why should girls be “beautiful” and play with dolls. He laughs it off, innocently, and believes women are not suited for wars. That laughter would haunt him years later when another young boy would laugh at the adult Bharani who says he likes playing with flowers more than with guns and swords. The more things change the more they remain the same. Patriarchal societies would breed generations with flawed ideas of gender roles. His sister Kannagi (Swathi Krishna), for all the progressive and liberal ideas she espoused and taught her brother, is doomed to a tragic fate of being married to a drunkard wife-beater. The laughter and happiness of her youth wiped off her being. This character draws inspiration from the women in the director’s life, in particular his mother, who was married at a young age and couldn’t complete her education.

It is interesting to note the names the director gives to the brother and sister. If Kannagi refers to the central character of the Tamil Sangam epic Cilappatikaram, who transforms from a simple, quiet and patient housewife to a heroic, and rage-driven revenge and justice seeker, Bharani is drawn from Bharani literature, a minor literary genre in Tamil that are collectively called Sitrilakkiyam. Bharani celebrates war and valour, the heroic deeds of kings/warriors who kill a thousand elephants in battle. The writing, at once, creates cages for both the characters, trapping their escape-seeking souls, pitting them in hostile environments. Bharani has been chosen to play the Arakkan king in the popular play Arakkan, to be held at the year’s biggest festival. Arakkan in Tamil means rakshasa (demon/devil). Theatre allows Bharani to channel his thoughts on the stage – in soliloquies, he asks whether empathy, which women possess, is a curse; even as his fellow theatre mates smack of aggressive heteronormative masculinity and jeer at him — “who claps for a play on women?” If that aggression falls uncomfortably silent when Bharani asks “if God is all-powerful, why does it need us to protect him?”, it swells into communal tensions at sites in towns where the play is staged. Ramakrishnan — and this is where he gets ambitious — tries to layer the small against the big, pitting the individual story against the larger contemporary socio-politics, majoritarian fundamentalism, rousing electoral cries and physical violence and abuse of women. The juxtaposition and writing here derails and feels rushed. Shot by Ramakrishnan along with Sanjay Sreeni and Kishore Karthik, the film has some beautiful imagery, and yet other visual decisions may feel a tad amateurish.

Poster of 'Poem of the Wind'.

The film, however, soars in capturing the underbelly of that tension, and making an individual’s angst palpable to the viewer. Poem of the Wind blends the akam and puram traditions of Sangam literature, where Akam poetry is associated with the interior, the feminine, and the individual, thus giving prominence to women, and Puram hails heroic deeds and exploits in war and public life, thus associated with the exterior, the masculine, and the world, and foregrounds the relationship between a king and his subjects.

Bharani tussles between the akam/agam (internal) and the puram (external). In talks of toxic masculinity what remains unaddressed is how men, too, are victims of said patriarchy. The unquestioned, internalised venom oppresses the weaker, gender irrespective. The director extends this gender discourse to religious nationalism, where the venom assaults the minority – whether of race, linguistic, creed, class, caste, gender and sexuality.

Gender is a social construct, gender is performative, gender is fluid. All men — even the most macho of them — have a feminine side to them — basically how kind and empathetic they are. Bharani tussles between his conditioning and social expectations on the one hand and being true to himself. “If gender attributes and acts…are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction,” Judith Butler wrote in her seminal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), describing how “bodily gestures, movements, and styles constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” and this shifts the concept of gender away from an identity marker to constituting a “social temporality”. And “laughter” can only emerge when the “realisation” is attained, to use Butler’s words, “that all along the original was derived.”

Through Bharani, Poem of the Wind — whose executive producer is Parth Saurabh known for his film Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar — creates Maya Angelou’s caged bird, who sings when he’s on the stage, for “a bird that stalks/down his narrow cage/can seldom see through/his bars of rage/his wings are clipped and/his feet are tied/so he opens his throat to sing… The caged bird sings/with a fearful trill/of things unknown/but longed for still/and his tune is heard/on the distant hill/for the caged bird/sings of freedom.”