(Spoilers ahead) The bizarre/surreal and Megha Ramaswamy are, more often than not, hand in glove. Through a range of diverse work, the filmmaker has displayed a proclivity for the unorthodox. To push the boundaries of genres, formats and storytelling. To wrest the attention to the female experience, be it that of a child or an adult. She aims to break every rule and structure in the book. She walks down memory lanes, and takes short sojourns, on the road to nostalgia at the now-shuttered Mumbai’s iconic music store Rhythm House (The Last Music Store, 2016, on MUBI), into the languid lanes of ennui in the lives of acid-attack survivors (Newborns, 2014, MUBI), into the phantasmagorical by-lanes of a child’s fears, heartbreak and fantasies (Bunny, 2015, MUBI), or the nooks and crannies of young people’s lives, from quirky desires and fun mumblecore (debut fiction What are the Odds? 2019, Netflix) to the dangerous and devilish (as a writer on Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan, 2011, Netflix).
In her latest, the Malayalam-Hindi mid-length psychological horror thriller Lalanna’s Song, Ramaswamy goes looking for the this-worldly in the other-worldly. It had its world premiere at Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles earlier this year recently screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), and its distribution rights in North America have been bought by Deaf Crocodile Films and Gratitude Films at this year’s Cannes film market. Achal Mishra’s Dhuin, which also played at DIFF, is the other indie to be picked up by them.
In Lalanna’s Song, she adds the delectable pairing of Parvathy Thiruvothu and Rima Kallingal, they are sour and sultry. An intelligent casting choice, not only are the two compelling actors in their own right — by-products of the Malayalam film industry, the Hindi belt will remember Parvathy from Qarib Qarib Single, 2017. Neither play to the gallery, or pander to the patriarchy within the Malayalam film industry, they are selective about the roles they pick, both speak up for women in the industry — the indefatigable Parvathy the outspoken of the two — both are part of Malayalam cinema’s feminist group Women in Cinema Collective and, thus, fit perfectly well in feminine spaces and feminist stories (they, surely, are changing in minuscule ways the bad rap that feminism gets!). To use Ramaswamy’s own words from an interview, “When one woman shines, we all radiate!”
They are also close friends in real life and, on reel, share an inimitable chemistry. There’s a natural ease, and an unstated sexual energy between the two characters — no, they aren’t queer, as much the visual-testosterone/stimuli-driven cis-het men would fantasise two girls sharing a natural chemistry as. Theirs is a lived-in camaraderie, from a time before, and while their husbands are mentioned in passing, in reference to sex — that’s all men are needed for, and maybe, to bring back Toblerone for children. Here are two mothers — one is seasoned and the other a new one — sharing a space of comfort. Shoby (Parvathy) and Miriam (Kallingal) are a Brahmin and a Muslim, respectively. Their religion, however, is evinced in two scenes, one where Shoby dons the burqa even though Miriam insists she doesn’t need to do it any longer in “New Mumbai”, where mindsets are, perhaps, different, more liberal. And, second, when a racial profiling takes place at the supermarket. The same burqa which Shoby found sexy minutes ago has now made her a victim. It’s interesting to see Ramaswamy shooting that one scene twice, once from Shoby’s perspective, and the other from Miriam’s — both in an embrace of solace — the camera now shifts from the perturbed Shoby’s face to an unmoved, stand-offish, cold smirk of Miriam’s. In this friendship, like there’s no place for niceties, there’s no place for sentimentality either, where friends need to be emotional anchors and succour for each other, massaging either’s ego. Some female friendships are also matter-of-fact.
The heroines are the anti-heroines here. The slippery-slope film’s texture is fluid, like the dynamics of its characters. And the visual dialogue between the characters and their environment. A hypnotic sunset on an empty beach complements the undercurrent of violence.
In Lalanna…, the two other men we see, for fraction-seconds, are also seen from the female gaze: one as an object of sexual desire, other as a sexual predator. Both are fathers, but in writing these paternal figures, Ramaswamy upends the idea of “providers of safety” associated with the gender and their social role. Lalanna’s mother is unwell we are told, but does she also have a freakish power like her daughter and suffering because of that, did she pass on that crippling power — a bane than boon — to her daughter? Ramaswamy, in none of her works, affords her characters any backstory, and thus, offers them no redemption. We know nothing about Lalanna’s origin — was she a Rhoda Penmark-like bad seed or a victim of evil forces who needed rescuing with love — or the oppressions Miriam and Shoby might have had to face in their past lives. Her purpose is to show the cyclicality of this enforced nature of ingrained violence/oppression and the recipients almost always being children — the real world stands testimony, from that singular image of Vietnam War to how the adult world and climate-change deniers were quick to villainise Greta Thunberg — signalling that tomorrow will just like be today, like yesterday.
The corporeality of death is a character in the film from the start, from the film opening with the scene of a beach and the lens stays on the legs of a presumably dead girl — the legs resembles that of a school-girl, like that of the Grady sisters from The Shining (1980) — to Parvathy’s banter with her little daughter Meenu about how her mother died when she felt bored, to the child seeing a corpse being carried out of a building, to another child, the titular pre-teen Lalanna (Nakshatra Indrajith), pleading with the adults not to compel her to sing lest she’d die.
The unlikeability of the characters in Lalanna’s Song isn’t skin deep, it has a gendered history, a violent one, that moves in vicious cycles, generational traumas are passed down from mothers to daughters unknowingly. Problematic mothers and freaky mother-daughter relationship is a recurring trope in Ramaswamy’s works. From a mother of a little girl (Syesha P Adnani) who is heartbroken after her bunny dies, and thrashes her child, upside down, in the surreal Bunny, to Shaitan, where the mother drowning and pulling her baby Amy/Amrita along with her to a grown-up Amy (Kalki Koechlin), haunted by her mother’s memories, missing the mother she couldn’t have to becoming her by donning her name and ending up at a place she feared the most (boarding school).
Women telling their own stories, of how they perceive themselves, as rebels but also as villains within their own radii, that they are not always susheel, selfless, martyrs, caring providers/nurturers but can also be evil beings, destroyers, not consciously so. That it’s always not white or black, but the greys that bring out the human in the patriarchy's assigned duality of the goddess or the whore. Here, however, as in most of Ramaswamy’s works, the focus, and her larger point, being children — to let children be children, to believe them even if they say or do what doesn’t fit in your realistic radar, to illuminate and enlighten with love not darken and erode the innocence with punishment and trauma.
While Lalanna’s… climax seems a tad too dramatised, Ramaswamy’s cinematic voice is neither mainstream, nor arthouse or independent. It can be befuddling, but always redolent, taking an aerial view of the individual to insinuate the big picture. Her next will likely be a feature Reshma Shera, again a children’s film, to be produced by Jar Pictures.
Lalanna’s Song, among a handful of DIFF 2022 titles, is playing at DIFF 2022 Online virtual screenings till November 13, buy an online pass to watch it. To buy and watch, visit: online.diff.co.in
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