Ariyippu is the year-end scene stellar that makes us hopeful for 2023

Among the Avant Garde filmmakers of Malayalam cinema, Mahesh Narayanan stands tall. His cinema is ravishingly ruminative and a microcosmic representational of a world outside the immediate milieu in Kerala that Mahesh so fluently and yet quietly articulates on screen.

In Ariyippu, streaming from 16 December on Netflix, Mahesh Narayanan actually steps out of his home territory in Kerala and takes the protagonists to NOIDA for better prospects. As migrant workers in a glove factory Kunchacko Boban and Divya Prabhu merge so effortlessly into the migrants’ world of invisibility that if you are not familiar with these two actors’ work, you would think they are actual migrants.

The only time they are called out is when someone during a scuffle mutters, “These bloody South Indian migrants.”

Hareesh and Reshmi would have remained entrapped in their citadel of anonymity, like Balraj Sahni and Nirupa Roy in Do Bigha Zameen, if something terrible didn’t happen. A doctored video surfaces, showing Reshmi performing oral sex on a man not seen in the video(anonymity/invisibility has many faces in Ariyippu). This ugly incident triggers off a chain of recalcitrant actions with far-reaching consequences to the married couple’s mutual trust fund.

Mahesh Narayanan’s has written a fable with irreversibly tragic consequences. As a director he is equally eloquent in evincing the drama as quelling it. Narayanan skillfully weaves through the crisis allowing the couple to bend so that they don’t break. In the process the breach in Reshmi’s marriage with Hareesh comes under a tremendous amount of scrutiny. None of this has an easy solution. The film isn’t offering any.

Throughout, Narayanan and his cinematographer (the vigorously minimized Sanu Varghese) maintain a distance to allow the couple to resolve what is more a dilemma of trust and faith than fodder for scandal. There is an energizing empathy that runs through the narrative. Reshmi and Hareesh encounter kind people everywhere in their struggle to put the dignity back into their marriage.

The local police officer (played by the ever-reliable Siddharth Bhardwaj) tells the couple to forget about it. And move on. He isn’t wrong. He is just not getting the point.

This cop is the only character in Narayanan’s starkly silhouetted drama who spells out the sex act which the woman in the video(ostensibly Reshmi) is seen performing.Everyone else is too mortified or scared to say it out aloud. Ariyippu tells us why silence in a place of compromise is toxic. As the narrative progresses—and there are lot of things happening here, including scams in the glove factory, which may not seem to have a direct relevance to the core issue—Reshmi emerges stronger, as Hareesh seems to surrender more and more to the forces he cannot control

The final moments of this very fine parable on sexual politics shows the couple walking away from the camera arguing heatedly, as a woman , a belated compromise coordinator in the business of ghosting the underprivileged, mumbles about their future like a cricket commentary.

Ariyuppu makes Hareesh and Reshami’s migratory journey intimate yet dispassionate. Just how Mahesh Narayanan manages this feat needs to be watched closely.He employs no tricks to make Reshmi and Hareesh’s story poignant. They are poor and powerless, hence they suffer without selfpity or anger.

It is incredibly admirable to watch a film so ambivalent in tone and yet so clear on what it intends to convey through the ambivalence. Is Ariyippu Mahesh Narayanan’s best work to date? Ghosh, that’s a tough one for a filmmaker whose every directorial stab so far—Take Off, C U Soon and Maalik—has been a devastating experience.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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