REVIEW 611: NJAN MARYKKUTTY

Release date:	Kerala: June 15, Delhi: June 22, 2018
Director:	Ranjith Sankar
Cast: Language:	Jayasurya, Jewel Mary, Innocent, Aju Varghese, Joju George, Shobha Mohan, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Malavika Menon, Siddhartha Siva, Kochu Preman, Jins Baskar, Advaith Jayasurya Malayalam

Mathukkutty has been torn by internal conflict since his childhood. Though born with the external appearance of a boy, he has always identified as a girl, and grows into adulthood feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body. Realising that this inner turmoil will haunt him forever if he does not become who he believes he was meant to be, he quits his high-flying corporate job in Chennai, undergoes gender reassignment surgery to begin the physical transformation to a woman and returns to Kerala for this arduous journey.

Writer-director Ranjith Sankar’s latest film is the story of Marykkutty nee Mathukkutty – not necessarily told in the order followed by that opening paragraph – and the many battles she must fight in a society that not merely rejects her but reacts viciously and even with physical violence towards this new challenge to the patriarchal status quo.

Men molest, humiliate and defame her. A female government official snarls at her for giving up the huge social advantages of being a man. Shunned by some, ridiculed or assaulted by others, she also finds kindness in unexpected places.

The most notable aspect of Njan Marykkutty is the normalisation of a character who, across Indian film industries, would usually be a source of humour. When Marykkutty is lampooned, the lampooning comes from people in the film, not the tone of the film itself.

This is significant because mainstream Mollywood in particular is unapologetically patriarchal and frighteningly misogynistic too often. Ranjith Sankar himself has revealed disturbing gender politics in earlier works: his supernatural flick Pretham (2016), for instance, among other things featured an ugly rape joke by Jayasurya’s character. 

Njan Marykkutty appears to emerge from conviction, so hopefully he has evolved. If his writing of this transitioning woman can be faulted at all, it is for its inability to see any faults in her. A member of a marginalised community does not have to be a saint to deserve equal rights, and this sanitisation is another form of othering to guard against.

That Sankar needs to evolve further becomes evident in a scene in which a Collector (Suraj Venjaramoodu) snubs a man for his transphobia by insinuating that he is a eunuch. Err, if you see eunuch as a pejorative, then you are part of the problem, no?

In another scene, Sankar seems to imply that reservations are for untalented individuals through a conversation between Marykkutty and the Collector, which fails to grasp the social complexities that give rise to the need for affirmative action.

In its own way Njan Marykkutty buys into prejudice again in an unthinking scene in which Marykkutty is asked by her teacher, “Are you a feminist?” and she feels the need to issue a clichéd denial. “No, I am a humanist,” she says. Umm, you are not a feminist, Marykkutty? So you are against gender equality? Duh.

The screenplay also needed greater clarity in a conversation in which Marykkutty states: “I am not a transgender, I’m transsexual.” Since transgender is an umbrella term that covers transsexual, it is unclear whether Marykkutty is not aware of this or whether she objects to being labelled with a general rather than specific term. Yeah yeah, I know what some of you are saying – this is not a documentary. But when you choose to make a film on a theme about which there is such widespread ignorance, you need to find ways to disseminate correct information without sounding like a PhD thesis.

These questionable portions in Njan Marykkutty do not, however, eclipse its over-arching inspirational spirit. The fulcrum of the film is Jayasurya’s interpretation of Marykkutty shorn of all tropes that have been seen as a compulsory aspect of LGBT+ individuals by most Indian filmmakers and actors, with a few exceptions. Don’t come looking for a limp wrist, over-the-top camp mannerisms, swivelling hips and a high-pitched voice here – this is not to say that trans persons with such characteristics do not exist, but that there are different kinds of trans persons and Indian cinema has rarely acknowledged that fact.

The only overt changes Sankar and Jayasurya make involve a visible touch of makeup, a switch to saris and blossoming breasts – the rest is barely discernible. Arun Manohar and Saritha Jayasurya are credited for the film’s costumes, and Saritha reportedly designed the endless array of gorgeous cotton saris that Marykkutty wears. Her wardrobe too defies Indian cinema’s stereotypes of trans persons.

Jayasurya’s sensitive portrayal of Marykkutty sans caricature is on a par with Sanchari Vijay’s National Award-winning turn in 2015’s Kannada release Naanu Avanalla…Avalu (I Am Not He, I Am She). As he did with the relatively ordinary Captain recently, here too he has shown his determination to be an actor rather than a star in his roles.

The most credible aspect of Sankar’s powerful screenplay is the equation between a transphobic policeman (Joju George) and Marykkutty. The defining passage in Njan Marykkutty comes when that cop takes sides in a fight between the heroine and some hooligans. The manner in which he, his colleagues and those goons manufacture a series of believable lies playing on prevalent biases against transsexuals and women is chilling.

It is interesting that through her struggles Marykkutty seeks refuge with a woman friend (Jewel Mary) who herself is widely reviled for her non-conformist life. Although the characterisation of a friendly RJ (Aju Varghese) is briefly confusing – creep or nice guy? – and Siddhartha Siva’s acting when his character flirts with Marykkutty borders on comedy that is incongruous in the kind of film this one clearly wants to be, it is interesting too that Sankar does not see a romantic relationship with a man as essential to complete a trans woman. Self-realisation and the acceptance of the self are far more important than the approval of others, even our loved ones, Njan Marykkutty tells us.

Barring Siva and Venjaramoodu, who does not quite pull off his nice-guy act here, the rest of the supporting cast do a good job of their roles, big and small.

Though the film’s background score gets mushy and over-emphatic at times, the camera’s relaxed gaze on Jayasurya is crucial to viewing Marykkutty as a regular person. Not once does DoP Vishnu Narayanan objectify or exoticise this unconventional lead.

This then is Ranjith Sankar’s great achievement here: that he sees Marykkutty not just as a trans person, but as a person. Jayasurya’s unaffected performance in Njan Marykkutty is a landmark not just for his career or Malayalam cinema, but for Indian cinema at large.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/njan-marykkutty-movie-review-jayasuryas-unaffected-performance-as-trans-woman-is-landmark-for-indian-cinema-4577361.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/NjanMaryKutty/

CAROL & ATTITUDES TO LGBT THEMES AT THE OSCARS / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

WHO’S AFRAID OF A HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN?

Carol’s exclusion from this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations is a reminder of a continuing Academy discomfort with LGBT-themed films

By Anna MM Vetticad

The Academy Awards are upon us, and not surprisingly, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign has risen to a crescendo. The blistering condemnation this year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters’ apparent racial bias though, threatens to overshadow criticism of another of their persistent prejudices evident in the nominations: homophobia.

Director Todd Haynes’ Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as women who fall in love with each other in 1950s New York, has received nods in six categories: Best Actress (Blanchett), Supporting Actress (Mara), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Score and Costume Design. It has not, however, been nominated for Best Director or the all-important Best Picture Oscar.

Now, it could well be argued that perhaps Academy voters genuinely did not consider Carol worthy. After all, our response to films is subjective and I may love a film (I did love Carol) that you may not like at all, without either of us being right or wrong. That being said, it is equally valid to ask these voters how it is possible that a film they deem well written, well acted, good looking and pleasing to the ear, is not good enough? They did not even need to drop any of the pictures in the present lot to acknowledge Carol. Academy rules permit 10 nominees for the Best Picture race, yet they chose to go with only eight picks this year.

Admittedly, it is possible for a film to have all its elements in place and yet not quite add up. In any cinematic venture, the director is the adder-uper (yes, grammar Nazis, I know that is not a word), the person who provides the glue that binds it all together, and it is no doubt possible that Academy voters genuinely believe Haynes’ cinematic mathematics was not right.

Possible.

The greater likelihood though, if we are honest about it, is that an Academy which is 94 per cent white, 76 per cent male and an average of 63 years old (source: indiewire.com) was simply uncomfortable with Carol. I mean, c’mon! What did you expect in response to two lesbian women who are not dead or broken at the end of the film, who shrug off the men in their lives, yet are not callous, and who – spoiler alert – prioritise happiness, peace of mind and being true to who they are above even that perceived Holy Grail of womanhood: maternity?

Over the years, many films on LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) themes and/or with primary or important supporting LGBT characters have earned Oscar nominations. The tendency though has been to award actors who performed these roles (Tom Hanks for Philadelphia in 1994, Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote in 2006, Sean Penn for Milk in 2009, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014) rather than the production in its entirety. Beautiful as these films are, it is important to point out that most possess features which might make them more acceptable and reassuring to an ultra-conservative viewer: an all-pervading sense of sadness and/or (supposed) degeneracy and in some cases, death for the LGBT character.

The Academy’s extreme aversion to homosexuality was never more evident than in 2006 when the eloquently heart-rending Brokeback Mountain was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the less deserving Crash. High-profile Academy member and veteran actor Tony Curtis said with undisguised disdain at the time: “This picture is not as important as we make it. It’s nothing unique. The only thing unique about it is they put it on the screen. And they make ’em (male gay lovers) cowboys… Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it.” Ernest Borgnine was too disgusted to even watch Brokeback. “I didn’t see it and I don’t care to see it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I know they say it’s a good picture, but I don’t care to see it. If John Wayne were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave!”

Five years on, the lines had edged forward marginally when The Kids Are All Right received four nominations including for Best Picture at the 83^rd Academy Awards in 2011. The film’s protagonists were not gay men, they were lesbian women. Theirs was not a closeted relationship; they were married – to each other. It was not a depressing story; it was a comedy drama. The Annette Bening-Julianne Moore- starrer did not win in any category, but even its nominations were a baby step ahead.

You might expect the hesitation over LGBT themes to have diminished half a decade later, that too in the year after the legalisation of same-sex marriages across all American states by the US Supreme Court. It has not. Carol, as several American commentators have pointed out, is perhaps just too female, too positive and too life affirming for the notoriously conformist Academy to go all the way with it.

The film’s central characters, Carol Aird and Therese Belivet, could be disturbing to traditionalists who continue to see LGBT persons as “the other”. They are not filled with self-doubt, they are not ashamed about their sexual orientation despite encountering social opprobrium and confusion, and their parting shot to the viewer is optimistic.

Now if only they’d had the courtesy to be miserable, they might have had a shot at a Best Picture nomination. To be female and homosexual and sure of yourself, that too half a century back – now that’s going a bit too far, no?

(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures Of An Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was published in The Hindu Businessline on February 27, 2016)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/whos-afraid-of-a-homosexual-woman/article8281138.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: The Right To Offend

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2016/01/freedom-of-expression-and-right-to-diss.html

Anna MM Vetticad’s Oscar Predictions for 2016

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/oscars-2016-predictions-leo-or-eddie-brie-or-cate-the-revenant-or-spotlight-our-picks-and-the-odds-on-favourites-2646756.html

Photo caption: Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in a poster of Carol

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_(film)

REVIEW 373: ALIGARH

Release date:	February 26, 2016
Director:	Hansal Mehta
Cast: Language:	Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi Hindi

In terms of timeliness, Aligarh hits the bull’s eye like few others, in a country where film industries hesitate to touch contemporary history. It arrives in theatres in a year when the national debate on the rights of LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) persons is louder than it has ever been here, with the Supreme Court earlier this month agreeing to re-examine Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that currently criminalises homosexuality.

Aligarh is based on the true story of Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras who was thrown out of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2010 after he was filmed by intruders while having sex with a male rickshaw puller in his quarters on campus. This happened in the year following the Delhi High Court’s historic ruling reading down Section 377 to effectively decriminalise homosexuality (overturned in 2013 by the Supreme Court and now once again under the lens of a larger SC bench).

Professor Siras successfully sued AMU in the Allahabad High Court. Shortly afterwards, he was found dead in mysterious circumstances in his apartment, in what was at first suspected to be a suicide.

For those who refuse to see the reality, his tragedy is a perfect illustration of how homophobia can destroy people. National Award-winning director Hansal Mehta (who earlier made Shahid and CityLights) and writer-editor Apurva Asrani have chosen to chronicle his life through a friendship that developed between the shy academic and real-life journalist Deepu Sebastian who wrote about the case in The Indian Express (called India Post in the film). Therein lies the film’s strength and its Achilles’ heel.

Young Deepu’s well-meaning questions to the elderly gentleman are used in a telling fashion to convey the point that this story is not about LGBT rights or an individual’s homosexuality alone. This is also very much about invasion of privacy, the fluid definition of privacy in a conservative society, loneliness and the right to dignity. It is about marginalisation that results from social prejudice and a potential victim’s fear of ostracism. This is a story of a reticent man who balked at labels, was rudely shoved under the spotlight and became a reluctant poster boy for India’s LGBT rights movement though all he wanted was to be left alone with his books, his Lata Mangeshkar and his self-respect.

Were you thrown out because you are gay? Was the rickshaw puller your lover? Any journalist in those circumstances would absolutely have to ask these questions. The aim must be to ask with sensitivity, and Deepu does well on that front, which is evidenced by Professor Siras’ willingness to engage with him in the midst of fools who would thrust a mike into an old man’s face and ask about a personal calamity, “Aapko kaise mehsoos ho raha hai (How do you feel)?”

Aligarh’s screenplay deftly and delicately handles these matters while making sure that the film is not ‘about an issue’ so to speak, but about a human tragedy.

The writing is well complemented by Manoj Bajpayee, who is unrecognisable here in the role of the elderly academic. The transformation is not merely cosmetic, he appears to have absorbed the professor into every cell of his being.

Like the character he plays in the film, the actor would know a thing or two about the sidelines, having inhabited the outskirts of Bollywood for almost two decades after his career-defining performance as Bhiku Mhatre in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998). Life has been tough until recent years for artists like him who are not in the singing-dancing-and-romancing-the-pretty-heroine mould. He was back in the reckoning with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) in which he played a bloodthirsty, horny gangster. Chameleon-like though he was in that film, it is nothing compared to the genius of his performance in Aligarh.

Rajkummar Rao as Deepu matches up to the veteran, although he is done in by the excessive focus on his character and in particular, by an awkwardly handled scene in the end when he hears of the professor’s demise. This brings us to the film’s big failing.

Despite the pluses described in the preceding paragraphs, the screenplay appears to forget early on that the subject of Aligarh is Professor Siras and not his relationship with Deepu. It would have been fine to use the reporter as a narrative device, but the film gradually loses focus as it becomes equally about both men rather than about one observing the other.

In fact, a brief interlude in which we are shown a sexual encounter between Deepu and his female boss ends up harming the cause the film seeks to espouse. This scene is clumsily juxtaposed against Professor Siras in bed with the rickshaw puller, clearly in an effort to underline the stance that casual sex between consenting adults should be okay irrespective of whether the couple in question is gay or straight.

Apart from the in-your-face nature of this messaging, what is bothersome is Aligarh’s narrow, shallow understanding of consent and the effort to position Deepu’s boss as the epitome of coolth. Errr…there is nothing cool about a woman boss inviting a male subordinate to consume alcohol with her on a darkened office terrace and then sexually propositioning him. The point, dear Team Aligarh, is not whether Deepu agrees to drink with her or sleep with her but whether there might have been professional consequences for him if he had refused.

No, she does not physically overpower him, she does not literally hold a gun to his head (though figuratively speaking, who is to say that is not what she was doing?) and we do not know her well enough to know whether she might have victimised him if he had said no, but given the complexities of sexual harassment at work, it is extremely simplistic to not have considered these questions before choosing to insert this scene in the film.

The argument attempted here could well have been conveyed without the woman having been Deepu’s boss, but because she is, and because this scene is inter-cut with Professor Siras coaxing the rickshaw puller into bed, what the film has unwittingly done is to draw a parallel between the professor and a character who should rightfully be viewed as a sexual predator at an office.

Ask yourself this, Team Aligarh: would you not have been troubled by these doubts if there had been a gender reversal, if Deepu had been a woman and the boss had been a man?

Because of the contrived and very obvious effort to establish an analogy between the two relationships, the power equation at the office ends up showing the class divide between Siras and his lover in a bad light. This is particularly unfortunate because the sexual liaison between a middle-class teacher and an impoverished man despite the social chasm separating them should otherwise have been a cause for wonderment.

Professor Siras was much older, highly educated, an award-winning writer, Maharashtrian, a Marathi teacher, a Hindu in a university originally set up for the education of Muslims and, as he points out in the film, he was resented by some for being successful despite being an outsider. His partner was Muslim yet could perhaps be deemed the vulnerable one of the two in the relationship: young, presumably not educated, a rickshaw puller and poor.

That they could have found tenderness between them despite their differing circumstances is fascinating and intriguing. Yet we are robbed of any exploration of that beauty by the super-imposition of his initial reaction to Siras’ overtures against Deepu’s hesitation when his boss makes a move on him. 

There is an eternal lesson in here for us all. The fact that a film is inspired by a moving real-life story does not automatically make it a moving film. The fact that a film supports a genuine and very important cause does not automatically make it effective.

Despite a sterling performance by Manoj Bajpayee and other positives, Aligarh ends up being an inconsistent biopic – on the one hand providing a beautiful portrait of reclusiveness, yet elsewhere doing a disservice to a man to whom this country owes an apology. 

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	120 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/bollywood-blogs/aligarh-review-manoj-bajpayees-sterling-performance-is-marred-by-inconsistent-writing-2644526.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligarh_(film)