Readers Write In #781: Woman’s day Double Bill – Yamakaathaghi and Gentlewoman!

By Bharath Vijayakumar

Caught up with two Tamil movies back to backup that ended up as a sort of double bill on Woman’s Day, with both movies having their say about patriarchy. And that is not the only similarity. Both movies are made by newbie filmmakers with a relatively new team. And finally, the most unimportant but also the most striking similarity is that both these films run for 113 minutes! These similarities apart, these two films are also drastically different from each other.

In Yamakaathaghi, Peppin George Jayaseelan combines superstition and supernatural themes together to deliver an important message on the ‘unspeakable’ evils of patriarchy and casteism. ‘Unspeakable’ is the key word that Yamakaathaghi wants to emphasis on. It is a telling tale about how the basic emotions of women are often buried in silence, because they are ‘unspeakable’ in a man’s world! Almost all the actors are either lesser known or unknown and it takes some time to come to terms with the characters and their relationship with each other. But the film gets to the point right away and this helps. The interval point arrives in a jiffy. The messaging is pretty neatly done without any shoehorning or by being too preachy but at the same time it also feels rushed and this comes in the way of registering the enormity of the emotions. There are some rough edges, particularly with an unknown cast but the crisp run time helps us oversee this. 

Joshua Sethuraman’s Gentlewoman is a film that keeps surprising you. It is chilling but also feels like a satire. The genre shift doesn’t always feel organic, but that shock is also what keeps you glued. Again, this is a crisp film that keeps you engaged and even entertains with humour at the unexpected of places. But the messaging of this film feels all over the place. If the intention was to showcase various POVs through various characters without judging them, then it ought to have remained that way. But we also have an end card explicitly stating something that leaves you confused. The film wants to state that it is always the women who bear the brunt in both conventional and unconventional relationships. But this is emphasized more through dialogues that seem random and never comes through satisfactorily through the film and its characters. And in a crucial scene, it comes across (maybe unintentionally) as though being in an unconventional secretive relationship is crueler compared to an attempt of sexual abuse. Wish filmmakers either remain conservative or if they want to be progressive, to be clear with it. Or if this film is about how progressiveness should not be confused with lack of sexual discipline or lack of boundaries or sexual manipulation and exploitation, then that should have been conveyed clearly. Agreeing or not agreeing with the filmmaker’s view is one thing but when you are not sure of what he is actually implying, it becomes difficult to either nod or argue. The writing is convenient and by sketching the primary male character as a womanizer, the intricacies of the subject and the equation between the characters goes for a toss and the film is reduced to rather simple equations. And this is perfectly fine if the intention was to deliver a thriller or a dark comedy. But when you are making a commentary about an important topic and about the state of women in a patriarchal and misogynist society, you cannot be simplistic and paint things in black and white. Lijo Mol is good, and Losliya is a pleasant surprise in an important role.