Ariyippu (Declaration) movie review: Misogyny collides with corruption and alienation in a compelling COVID-time saga

Language: Malayalam and Hindi with Tamil On a cold December morning in gray, wintry Uttar Pradesh, a worker from Kerala learns that someone has mixed footage of her with visuals of a woman whose face is partially camouflaged while performing a sexual act. Her husband discovers the doctored video being circulated in a WhatsApp group of a factory that produces medical gloves where they are both employed. Hareesh (played by Kunchacko Boban ) seems confident that his wife Reshmi ( Divya Prabha ) is not the unidentifiable woman in the video. She is gutted because she knows she is not. The setting is a suburban edge of Delhi in end-2020 when COVID had emptied out India’s streets and masks on human faces were the norm. In Mahesh Narayanan ’s new film _Ariyippu_ (Declaration), masks fall off and true colours are revealed as Hareesh decides to fight for justice and Reshmi becomes embroiled in a battle not of her making. Ariyippu is being premiered at the ongoing Locarno Film Festival. It is Mahesh’s fourth film as a director. He has also written, co-produced and co-edited it. The veteran editor turned to direction in 2017 with _Take-Off_ , an account of Malayali nurses in ISIS captivity in Iraq. He has explored thorny political subjects in each of his films so far. _C U Soon_ – a pioneering pandemic-time creation that was conceived and made entirely during lockdowns in 2020 – was about online strangers and offline exploitation. _Malik_ dealt with inter-community relations and the games the establishment plays. Ariyippu initially appears to be a saga of Reshmi and Hareesh’s desperation to leave India for jobs abroad, but ends up being about the effect the fake video has on their marriage and work. Along the way, it explores multiple themes including the sense of alienation that blue-collar personnel experience when they cross borders even within the country, varying definitions of “greener pastures”, the manner in which India’s justice system is designed to be easily flipped against complainants, the constraints that age and poverty place on individuals, corruption in business and the casual moral corruption of the rich. At its heart, though, Ariyippu is about patriarchy and misogyny.

Kunchacko Boban has a disarming personality that he taps here, so it’s a while before we see that Hareesh’s outrage over the fake video is about his own ego and not concern for Reshmi. More than one man in Ariyippu, while referring to the exploitation of a woman, makes it about himself and his pain, relegating the woman to the margins. Hareesh openly trivialises Reshmi’s trauma and denies her agency every step of the way. Ariyippu acknowledges the existence of women enablers, as any accurate representation of patriarchy would, but unlike the public discourse that focuses inexorably on such women and exaggerates their numbers, this film firmly spotlights female solidarity. Ariyippu overturns stereotypes in the way _The Great Indian Kitchen_ did with its rare portrayal of a lonely daughter-in-law turning to her mother-in-law for advice. We hear that a woman in this plot was unjust to a woman in the past, but within the frames of this film, Reshmi receives nothing but kindness from women colleagues and in turn becomes a willing ally in a crusade undertaken by a senior factory staffer (Lovleen Mishra). Both women are the moral compass of the world they inhabit. Women in Ariyippu are sources of consolation, inspiration and strength to each other. Reshmi’s friendship with her colleague Sujaya ( Athulya Ashadam ) is marked by a moving, unspoken understanding of mutual suffering. And when one woman digs her heels in over an important issue, she spurs Reshmi to stand her ground against Hareesh. Among Ariyippu’s acute observations of gender relations are truths we all know but shrug off: that when men clash, they exact revenge by degrading each other’s female relatives (as happens in this storyline) and community members; that patriarchy weaponises even innocuous actions and objects. A visit to a toilet is misunderstood in Ariyippu, a woman covering her face for her protection becomes a tool to shame another woman in a fake video. No man in Ariyippu bears the grotesque markers of villainy that commercial cinema often resorts to. Here, we have sweet-looking Hareesh, the avuncular manager Suresh (Kannan Arunachalam) and the merciful factory owner ( Danish Husain ) – the sort of benign-looking chaps whose grievous acts of omission or commission society would gladly forgive. The film, however, is clear that it stands with the persecuted, not the persecutors or their facilitators. Ariyippu depicts women’s oppression including physical abuse without ever seeking to titillate. Even in the video that sparks the pivotal conflict, sex is implied, not shown. In the film’s most shocking scene, when a man commits rape, we barely see the violence with our eyes.

It has taken a Kerala-based filmmaker to replicate the heterogeneity in language usage in the north in a way that northern filmmakers do not. Malayalam, Hindi and Tamil are efficiently knitted into Ariyippu’s dialogues since these are the languages naturally spoken by the principal players. One of the film’s most charming scenes features four characters in a room conversing with each other in three languages, not all of which they all understand. Communication is possible because the person in the position of greatest socio-economic privilege among them – the factory owner, a Hindi speaker – does not lord it over the rest. While this camaraderie is not reflective of the dominant reality in north India, it does reflect the best that the north can be. The worst is the man who tosses a slur at Hareesh. In shedding his image as a romantic hero, Kunchacko Boban, who is also one of Ariyippu’s producers, has exhibited an astonishing range in recent years, from playing an insecure spouse in How Old Are You? (2014), to a loveable villager helping a child realise his dream ( _Kochavva Paulo Ayyappa Coelho_ , 2016) and a tribal rights activist in _Pada_ (2022). Hareesh in Ariyippu is the most dislikeable of these men, yet Kunchacko inhabits him with a comfort that belies his innate charm. Even the character’s scruffiness wrestles to stay on top of the actor’s squeaky clean, scrubbed and washed persona. It’s a fascinating blend, one that makes Hareesh confusing to even a diehard feminist and thus, a triumph of both casting and acting. Divya Prabha aces a taxing role that requires her to be inconsistent and conflicted, submissive and rebellious by turns. That a man was able to write Reshmi’s confusion without viewing her through a judgemental lens is impressive. Her varying stances in the matter of the video will best be grasped by women who know the burning rage that follows every single humiliation at the hands of sexual predators and discriminatory chauvinists, a rage tempered by the painful awareness that complaining or even reacting in any way usually brings with it consequences – for those wronged, not for the wrongdoer. Divya knows. And she moulds Reshmi into a dormant volcano, seemingly self-effacing, yet bristling with fury, frustration and a conscience. The cast is filled with familiar faces and unknowns, all of whom feel like real people plucked out of life and planted in this film. Among the memories Ariyippu leaves us with are Lovleen Mishra’s earnestness, Athulya Ashadam’s speaking eyes and the truly awesome Sidharth Bhardwaj as a corrupt Noida policeman asking in all sincerity why Keralites would hunt for work in the north when northerners are heading southwards for opportunities these days. Ariyippu is bookended by extended shots of the assembly line in the factory, underlining the mechanical relentlessness of capitalist enterprise notwithstanding the turbulence in the lives of humans involved. Mahesh Narayanan chronicles Reshmi and Hareesh’s story as if he was a silent, attentive bystander just inches away. Ariyippu draws us into their universe from its first moment with a prologue presenting a cellphone shoot of Reshmi playing on our screens while Hareesh is filming her. DoP Sanu John Varughese monitors the rhythm of the goings-on without any disruptive, flashy moves. This minimalist approach is embraced by Jothish Shankar’s production design, and Vishnu Govind and Sree Sankar’s sound design. I can think of only a couple of occasions in the narrative when understatement translates to the exclusion of too much information. Few cinematographers have shot NCR in the throes of winter as starkly as Sanu has here_._ His compositions in this film are perhaps rivalled most closely by Angello Faccini’s cinematography for Ivan Ayr’s _Meel Patthar_ (2021) and Avik Mukhopadhayay in Shoojit Sircar ’s _October_ (2018). In the daytime, Sanu showcases the city’s exteriors and the factory with all colour and warmth sucked out of them, mirroring the protagonists’ humdrum routine and joylessness. He shifts to dreary lighting in the nights including in the shabby, choc a bloc insides of their home. Slice-of-life cinema has seldom been more true to life than this. Rating: 4.5 (out of 5 stars)  This review was published when Ariyippu was premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2022. The film is currently at the International Film Festival of Kerala. It is now streaming on Netflix.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial Read all the  **Latest News** ,  **Trending News** ,  **Cricket News** ,  **Bollywood News** ,  **India News**  and  **Entertainment News**  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.