There’s a scene, early on in Aattam, a mise en scène, a stage adaptation of Girish Karnad’s renowned play Hayavadana (1971), in which young Padmini is pursued by two friends, the godly, intelligent Devadutta and the demonic, attractive Kapila. In the play within the film (The Play), Hari (Kalabhavan Shajohn) beheads and unmasks Vinay (Vinay Forrt). The mask is the severed head of a horse, a creature symbolic of strength, courage and freedom. The scene is a foreshadowing. The Malayalam movie foregrounds male hypocrisy even as a sexually harassed woman is besieged by an army of men who are sitting in judgement over an act one of them has committed. The film has a profound impact because neither the act of violence is shown, nor is the culprit.
Aattam Movie Overview: Small earning, big reward
Mind you, Anand Ekarshi’s debut ‘independent’ small-budget film Aattam: The Play has won three awards, including the Best Feature Film, at the 70th National Film Awards. That is a huge deal. The film, which made Rs 1.5 crore at the box office, has surpassed ALL Indian films of 2022, across all languages, all film industries (Bollywood to Telugu), and all the big studio films and Rs 1,000-crore-club blockbusters (Shah Rukh Khan’s triptych Pathaan, Jawan, Dunki to Rishab Shetty’s Kantara), to stand tall as India’s Best Feature Film of that year. Perhaps, for the first time in a long, long time, the National Film Awards has done justice to its name. However, the film’s artistic stance will garner both accolades and brickbats.
The National Award for Best Feature Film in Malayalam went to Tharun Moorthy’s Saudi Vellakka.
The Malayalam film 'Aattam: The Play' won the National Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Screenplay and Best Editing.
Aattam Movie Overview: #MeToo movement
It took an independent Malayalam film to offer a self-probing meta commentary on the film industry’s mis-handling of the #MeToo movement (actor Dileep’s 2017 sexual assault case) as well as of the latent misogyny in the performing arts industry, from films to theatre. The long-awaited Justice Hema Committee report, on conditions of women professionals in Malayalam film industry, is likely to release today.
Aattam Movie Trailer & Synopsis
The stolid lens of Aattam: The Play leaves you gobsmacked. The Malayalam film puts the spotlight on 12 men and a woman who make up a theatre troupe, Arangu. Anjali (Zarin Shihab), an architect who moonlights as a theatre actor, is the sole woman in the all-male group. After a successful play performance, the sole actress is subjected to a crime from one of the men at an afterparty. Suspicions surface as stories unravel and truths raise their ugly heads.
Aattam Movie Review
In Aattam, all the men like Anjali. Some try to catch her fancy. She’s desirable so long as she’s smiling, accommodating and being convivial. Basically, being a butterfly on the wall that pleases the onlooker’s eyes and doesn’t sting. But she’s a moth, she will remind you of the importance of endings in the process of transformation and how the lack of an ending/resolution is the reality of a survivor’s story.
Scores of films have been consumed and produced on the taming of the shrew but rarely has an Indian film, made by a man for other men, centred the muting of a survivor.
Anjali likes her childhood sweetheart and fellow theatre actor Vinay, who has a relationship with her, promises to unite with her after his divorce, but hides his and Anjali’s relation from the world. Red flag, if you may. Toxic males aren’t all raging bulls, most are sweet souls great at camouflaging their noxious traits.
Kalabhavan Shajohn and Zarin Shihab in 'Aattam' (2023)
Aattam Film Review: Themes of Sexual harassment, male hypocrisy, art-world hypocrisy
Vinay has also been with the troupe for 14 years, playing the hero of the plays until, his bête noire, film star (albeit a screen villain) Hari enters the troupe, snatches the hero’s role and brings with him name, fame and money for the group. This segment shows how popular/mainstream films and film actors staking a claim to the stage has rendered stage actors jobless and theatre as an art form grappling at the straws. Something similar happened to indie cinema as the mainstream fraternity conquered the OTT space.
Aattam is an unapologetic stare into male hypocrisy but it does not probe further. These men are not given the scope to dwell on their own dilemma or project guilt, self-reflect, introspect, which might be a commentary on most men not engaging in any of these.
Contextualising women’s issues is not new to Malayalam cinema. From PK Rosy to Adoor Gopalakrishnan, films of yore have held that mirror to a regressive, patriarchal society. And, in recent times, some films are rekindling the flame.
Remember when Jeo Baby’s Nimisha Sajayan-starrer The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) took the whole of India by storm? Because it spoke of the relatable plight of a housewife, stuck in a chore-full house with two men: her husband and father-in-law, who insists she doesn’t pressure-cook the rice but make it on woodfire, among other demands. Then came Mahesh Narayanan’s Divya Prabha-starrer Ariyippu (2022), which shows a woman in glove factory who gets wrongly framed in a scandalous video, and how that stirs up a storm in her personal and professional life; a working-class woman is pitted against a corrupt system. Don Palathara’s Family (2024), starring Vinay Forrt and Divya Prabha, showed how a woman, who’s an eye-witness to child abuse, is asked to keep her mouth shut. Aattam goes steps further to make us all feel uncomfortable, with our eyes turned inwards, in a self-reflexive gaze, for the kind of society we have allowed to thrive, unquestioningly.
Forrt in his anti-hero, self-serving-lover avatar, in both Aattam and Family, is compelling.
ALSO READ: 'Family' and Don Palathara's 'grey cinema': Church, community, and the cunning
Aattam highlights male ego, misogyny, moral policing and betrayal. How men deny women their personal space or any semblance of dignity. They even deny validity to a survivor’s testimony with such conspiracy theories as tactile hallucinations; ascribing motives and victim blaming.
A still from the film.
Most women will feel vindicated and seen after watching this film; some men will, hopefully, self-reflect on seeing the vérité-like depiction of a harsh reality, although we are aware of the Brechtian alienation effect, we know this is acting, a masked performance, evinced by the film’s title, too. Yet others will criticise and find this social realism drama, an entire film on one incident, pointless, even uncinematic.
The film generalises. But generalisation, as much as naming the culprit, is important today. In the post #MeToo world, in a society where rapes and gender-based violence is quotidian affair, the onus needs to fall on all men. Men raising #NotAllMen placards must prove its validity to women, and not the other way around, as it usually happens in real life, as it happens in Aattam, which, like its 12 angry men, doesn’t bat an eyelid in making the woman go through the humiliation and mental trauma all over again. Men close in ranks with other men. The Bro code hasn’t changed much since Mohanlal-Mammootty’s salad days.
A still from the film.
The film unspools as a whodunnit and whydunnit, deploys Rashomon effect, only to reveal itself as a red herring. It denies any catharsis, any sense of justice. In a very Roman Polanski’s Chinatown way, Aattam’s open, unresolved ending tells us that the victim/survivor will suffer, the perpetrator will get away, the status quo will be undisturbed, the vicious cycle will continue. Quite fitting, then, that Ekarshi also bagged the National Award for Best Screenplay. One that is boosted by its taut editing, which won Mahesh Bhuvanend the National Award for Best Editing.
Star Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Aattam is streaming on Amazon Prime
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