Ullozhukku movie review: The 'undercurrent' in this film comes to life with Urvashi and Parvathy's sheer brilliant performance

Director: Christo Tomy

Cast: Urvashi, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Prashant Murali, Arjun Radhakrishnan

Morality is a spectrum and many of us fall at different places in this spectrum. What an individual believes is right and wrong is mainly influenced by the community that they live in. They are conditioned to believe certain things to be incorrect. For instance, extra-marital affair is one such thing. Majority of people believe that affairs are morally incorrect, and in some countries it was even considered a crime punishable by law. Now, affairs may not be a crime, but they are still frowned upon by the society. This is already a nuanced situation as a set-up for a plot. There is so much potential in this set up, especially when a talented writer decides to take this on. Now, add to this patriarchy. Not patriarchy reinforced by men, but patriarchy that is reinforced by women who are conditioned to believe that the right society to live in is an unequal society. Then, its an altogether different ballgame.

Now, debut director-writer Christo Tomy has taken on this combination to tell us a story of love, lust, secrets and seduction in Ullozhukku. A story about a young wife Anju who is unhappy in her marriage. She seeks happiness outside of the institution, and finds respite in the attention of her lover Rajeev (Arjun Radhakrishnan). Sure, she doesn’t disturb the status quo at home, and even puts up with the demands of her marriage. So what would happen if her husband – Thomaskutty (Prasant Murali) – who she is unhappy with loses his life after struggling with an illness? Would that mean freedom for Anju? Can she escape the constraints of an institution that she was forced to sign up for? Unfortunately, no. India places a lot of priority on familial piety, especially so for women. Despite her husband’s death, Anju continues to be imprisoned in this marriage because of her mother-in-law Leelamma, portrayed brilliantly by Urvashi. It is at this point that audiences would begin to look at a ‘villain’. Most often, it is the women who is villainised, and there is also a lack of understanding in such written characters.

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The nuances required to spell out the fact that these women were conditioned to believe in patriarchy is mostly absent. It is also easier to skip out on these details in favour of indulging the voyeur in everyone. How easy would it be to call Anju a morally corrupt woman, or to call Leelamma patriarchal and worthy of criticism? These are probably the most expected directions that a story of this setting would take. Fortunately, with Christo’s talented writing, what I observed was that neither of the women were blamed visually or in words in the story. Meaning, there were no visual cues to associate one of the women better than the other, and neither were there dialogues that did the same in an absolute manner. Instead, what we got for two sides of a story. We take a call on who we want to side with, and entertainingly enough, just when you decide to put your support behind one of them, there comes something that abuses you out of this notion.

Ullozhukku in its first 10 minutes had me hooked, and from there it only got better. I felt like the film was a revolving door that gave the audience an entry into the complex psyche of a woman. For instance, we have Leelamma as someone who was herself in an unhappy marriage. Yet, she was forced to reconcile with her situation and supress her true feelings, to in a way, cheat herself into believing that she was fine. She does empathise to an extent with Anju’s situation, but years of conditioning puts her status as a mother-in-law before that of being a fellow woman who has gone through similar experiences. Anju, on the other hand, struggles in this prison like situation from the very beginning, and until the very end, we are left to wonder if she will ever escape this suffocating situation.

The backdrop of the floods, the setup of the mortal remains of Thomaskutty being ‘afloat’ with no burial ground, and Leelamma’s stubborn request that everyone wait for the flood to recede to bury her son in the ancestral burial ground adds tension and drama to the overall complex situation. It is not easy for a writer to not fall for certain easy cop out methods in terms of say a plot device, or the direction of the story itself. So Ullozhukku also has such moments, yet, the brilliant undercurrent that has been captured in the film overrides these details. For a film that is titled Undercurrent, it is fitting that I came out of it feeling as if I was finally able to escape the confines of a suffocating situation, and left with more questions on how society has done a number on women.

Rating: 4 (out of 5 stars)

Priyanka Sundar is a film journalist who covers films and series of different languages with a special focus on identity and gender politics.