In Naan Kadavul, Bala told us that life was hell, and yet, there was hope for redemption — a self-proclaimed god (even if not quite God) could come by and slice your throat and liberate your soul from further suffering. In Paradesi,
his mood isn’t as hopeful. He still tells us that life is hell, but
just as you think there’s a chance of escaping this hell, there’s a
different hell around the corner, and in the corner beyond that, and the
one beyond that. It’s a vicious vortex, and it’s no surprise that the
film ends with a song set to the tune of ‘Ye theeruga nanu’, Bhadrachala
Ramadasa’s mournful plea to the Lord. Even if we cry out to kadavul, is He listening?
Paradesi, which is inspired by events depicted in the novel Red Tea
(about impoverished villagers duped into bonded labour on tea estates),
opens in a village named Salur, in 1939 — and it incorporates
everything we have come to associate with this filmmaker. The subhuman,
even animalistic, hero who seems to have evolved in a cave on the outskirts of civilisation. The loosu ponnu
heroine (played by Vedhika). Individuals who are torn from one family
and who form new families with similarly stranded people. The casual
conflation of the serious and the light-hearted, as in a wedding
sequence that plays over a death. And, of course, brutal violence,
portrayed with scrupulous attention to the specifics.
Then there’s the humour. Bala is so often described as “dark,”
“disturbing” and with other qualifiers of this ilk that we forget
sometimes how funny he can be, in that twisted and macabre way of his.
Rasa (an expressive Atharva Murali) trades insults freely with his
hunchbacked grandmother, and once the story shifts to the tea estate, we
meet a Britisher (he lip-syncs his Tamil lines better than most of our
heroines) who loves to bed Indian women, whom he then rechristens with
English-sounding names.
But even with all these Bala-isms, there’s something about Paradesi that makes us feel it’s his truest
film yet — for, despite these sprinklings of humour, there’s no real
lightness, not much crowd-pleasing calculation. Almost all characters
(including the labourer played by Dhansika) are subdued and solemn. And
while there’s something to be admired in this purity of purpose, this
also makes the film seem like one long stretch of the same shade, an
illusion that’s furthered by the ashen cinematography.
This is perhaps easier explained with the example of Schindler’s List, a film that springs to mind the minute the new arrivals at the tea estate are given a physical examination. Paradesi, like Schindler’s List,
is the depiction of the systematic brutalization of a section of
innocent people, but the Hollywood film showcased these sufferings
through the doings of its hero, while this film has no use for a
redeemer — and we are left with nothing but the suffering, no parallel
stories, no subplots, nothing. It’s just one bad thing after another,
and while this sameness can be rationalized — “the unrelenting bleakness
of the movie is but a reflection of the unrelenting bleakness in these
people’s lives” — it doesn’t make for a very gripping narrative.
This sense of sameness is everywhere, even in the nominal hero. Rasa is
treated badly by the people in his village, and he’s treated badly at
the tea estate. He has to scrounge around for food there, and it’s no
different here. He works like a mule there, and he works like a mule
here. Given that the things that happen to him before and after his
enslavement aren’t all that varied in tone (they vary only in texture),
we become numb to his suffering after a point. Is this enough in a
mainstream movie?
For, finally, this is a mainstream movie. There is a love angle (with
the lovely duet, ‘Avatha paiya’). And as counterpoint to this duet,
there are three dirges that play over scenes of suffering. There
is aural melodrama (an overbearing score that strives to amp up the
tragedies tenfold). There is visual melodrama, as in the frame where the
palm of a dying man rises slowly and dramatically from the bottom of
the screen. And there are villains in the form of sneering, unfeeling
whites, who laugh about the news that their employees are being felled
by the plague. These traditional commercial-film elements are an odd fit
in a film that’s attempting to be something wholly different. Paradesi is an important lesson on a forgotten chapter of history, but as cinema, Bala’s truest isn’t up there with Bala’s best.
Paradesi
Genre: Drama
Director: Bala
Cast: Atharva Murali, Vedhika, Dhansika
Storyline: The real story of villagers who suffered in the tea estates of pre-Independence India
Bottomline: Not up with Bala’s best.
