Readers Write In #666: Kaathal- The Core and the Cover

By Karthik Amarnath

The biggest surprise in Jeo Baby’s Kaathal-The Core is how squeaky clean it looks. I hardly saw a scene with a dirty floor or a messy room. All the frames are clean, all the clothes neatly pressed, the mustaches perfectly trimmed. For a film that’s titled The Core, the screen feels like the gloss. And this coming from Jeo Baby who shot to fame with The Great Indian Kitchen, a film that kept showing us a dirty kitchen sink filled with stagnant water, greasy dishes and chewed-on grimy residue. In contrast, when we see food in Kaathal it’s all neatly arranged on clean white plates and we rarely see characters eat a morsel. If The Great Indian Kitchen were a sweaty sex scene from a European art house film, Kaathal-The Core would be the two sunflowers covering up a kissing scene in a 60s Tamil film. 

The obvious reason here is that Kaathal is a movie with big stars— Mammootty, Jyothika— and a sensitive subject— homosexuality, and as the writers themselves have said, they wanted everyone to watch and take away something from this film. But thats an easy reason, and it glosses over the core theme that the movie is after, which is the very idea of a clean image, or rather the ideal of the clean image. Take the pivotal moment that gets the film going. Jyothika’s character, Omana, has just filed for divorce, citing cruelty due to her husband Mathew’s sexual preference, and Mathew (played by Mammooty) returns home after hearing that. He walks hurriedly to his room, right past Omana in the corridor, and looks into a mirror, a seething rage building up in his eyes. The natural thing to expect here is an eruption of emotion, or at least a heated argument, but instead we see him splash cold water on his face, and what follows is a typical evening in this household. Omana reads out a prayer, the family (which includes his father and her brother, both of whom know about the divorce petition) listen patiently, and at the end, they exchange blessings with folded hands. The entire scene— but for a moment’s awkwardness from Mathew— plays out like a neatly choreographed ritual. It’s a picture perfect family moment, comforting in no small part because we know that these are people who care for each other.

But then we know that this picture perfect family isn’t what it is, and what the film questions is our desperate need to hold on to such idealized images, often at the cost of our own happiness. We see this idea play out in the small arcs of the film. Like the man who treats his laborer as family but just will not see him as his son-in-law. Or like the adolescent kid who loves playing with his new step-sister but refuses to see his mother with her new husband. (Interestingly, the film doesnt give us a single image where the man’s daughter and her lover are together, nor does it ever show us the boy’s step-father.) And then there’s the bigger arc of the film, which is about the gay Matthew trying to keep up the perception that he is straight. This is not a man who lacks rationale, or compassion for others, and yet, when it comes to his own life, he keeps boxing himself (and his family) further and further into a faux reality.

Partly his actions are driven by the political context in the film, where Mathew is cajoled into contesting for a local election. Here too we see the film reinforce the idea of a clean image almost literally. Mathew has spent a good part of his life serving his community through his bank at much personal risk, and yet we’re told thats not as important as his identity— as a communist, as a Roman Catholic.  The film doesn’t give us a single instance where he actively campaigns (he’s always in between events in the car), nor do we hear anything about his plans or a manifesto. Instead, what the film keeps showing us are posters of Mathew, wearing a clean red shirt, with a message that he is a leftist independent candidate. It’s a sly commentary on how politics is only about optics, and it also reinforces the idea that it’s this clean and superficial image that Mathew seems to be fighting for, even if its a fight against his own self. 

In a way, the political angle reminded me of a similar idea Jeo Baby used in The Great Indian Kitchen. There the plight of the housewife who was already suffering in servitude worsened when the men decided to take up the Ayyappan Vratham.  Her limited freedoms not only started disappearing but were also deemed so sinful that the situation became untenable for her. Here, in Kaathal, we similarly see the political contest blow up the stakes of the divorce proceedings that it soon becomes a test of how long can Mathew hide his true self under all that pressure. What we dont get here though is a combustion of emotion that gave us an explosive climax in The Great Indian Kitchen. We do have a collision of dramatic elements here— a political contest, a gay man in a Catholic community, and a courtroom battle between a husband and wife— but it doesn’t lead to one loud reaction in the film.

There’s a sharply observant passage in the recent Oscar-nominated Palme D’Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall, which also has a courtroom dissection of a marriage. The wife in that film— who, like Omana in Kaathal, is a writer— says, “A couple is a kind of chaos, where everybody’s lost. Sometimes we fight for each other, sometimes we fight alone, sometimes we fight against each other.” For the circumstances in Kaathal, these lines should very well hold true for Mathew and Omana’s marriage. But the film’s design is such that it keeps us at a distance from any conflict, let alone the chaos. We’re left to imagine what it must be like based on the actor’s silences, or some hint and hearsay. For instance, we only hear the facts about how much sex this couple had (or didn’t have), and its shared in court, as a matter of fact, with Omana’s unnerving composure (again, unlike The Great Indian Kitchen which had no qualms about showing the pangs of a woman who’s denied sexual foreplay). Here, we need to infer Omana’s feelings from the fact that she spends her time writing racy romantic novels. (There’s a neat bit of writing here where Omana is the kind of woman who only expresses her feelings in the written word. So when she says later that she found it easy to file a legal petition instead of talking things through, we can see why).

This lack of any open conflict creates a constant sense of unease since we aren’t given an easy connect to what Matthew and Omana are going through. We do get one deeply poignant moment at the interval point, where the musical cues clue us in on the feelings of each character as they look on at Mathew’s poster. The most impactful of those images is not of Mathew or Omana, but of Mathew’s lover, Thankachan, whose pain we instantly connect to. Thankachan has far less of the family support or the social status that Matthew enjoys. In that interval scene, we see him walk slowly into a car, and look longingly at Mathew, rain splashing across his window. His muted presence, as a lonely spectator to the events unfolding, makes us feel the weight of society’s judgement on his life. Never once in the film do we see him smile. All through , we see him with his car, that’s bearing an ‘L’ board, as though he has still to prove to society that he is worthy of a license… to be. 

It’s fitting then that the final image in Kaathal – The Core is of Thankachan’s car, now without that ‘L’ board, riding towards a rainbow, with the obvious suggestion of a brighter future for him and Matthew. But seeing that image only left me with a sense of disquietude. In fact all the clean images, the conflict-free design, and most jarringly, the absence of a single frame featuring the lovers, together, in love, it all made me question: If society at large is still not ready to see people for who they are or a relationship for what it is, then is the happy ending something to hold on to? Or is it just a rainbow— beautiful and symbolic, but an empty play of light?