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Nisha Susan: When the dialogue lingers, but the love doesn’t
Nisha Susan: When the dialogue lingers, but the love doesn’t
Sometime last year at a university in western Canada, in the stairwell leading to a basement I found among a clutch of small squiggles on the wall, a little question asking saadanam kayilundo? I laughed at the sight of this Malayali shibboleth. The internet is full of reels of Malayalis asking strangers this question. This is how we find each other in Delhi parking lots or from boats in icy lakes. It's a line from a 1990 buddy cop movie that translates roughly to “got the stuff?”
Sreenivasan had that ability to make the ordinary phrase incredibly meaningful and memorable. Sometimes it was because he was the gifted actor performing the dialogue. Sometimes because it emerged from the mouths of the hundreds of actors for whom he wrote memorable dialogue and screenplays. Sometimes it was because he had directed the movie. If ever there was someone who had the stuff, it was Sreenivasan. For whole generations of Malayalis, our tongues ran in the rhythm he set. Irony and self-deprecation made us who we were. As much as Sreenivasan was central to my love for Malayalam cinema, Malayali culture and Kerala, in the last decade he was central to the souring of some of those relationships. When he died last week, I had to really stick my arm into my ribcage to check: what do you feel? Is thestuff in there?
If I have ever considered getting a tattoo, I'd have got a line of Sreenivasan dialogue and the options would have been a zillion. After his death, I have had to acknowledge that it's been years since our one-way relationship has thrived. It began its withering with Sreenivasan offering his support to the actor Dileep then accused (and since acquitted) of organising a “quotation” (contract) to kidnap and sexually assault a fellow actor in 2017. Sreenivasan said, “The Dileep I know wouldn't spend 1.5 paisa for something like this, forget 1.5 crore.”
One could read that as a typical Sreenivasan remark about Dileep's financial parsimony and laugh like he did, I suppose. I didn't. Later, he said that the Women in Cinema Collective who supported the woman actor were wrong to demand better conditions for women in the industry. Imagine.
Does it make sense to feel less than fulsome affection and gratitude for Sreenivasan based on a few of his opinions? Isn't this a classic moment to separate the art from the artist, as we are often advised to? Perhaps it is possible in some forms, but so rarely is it possible in cinema—a beautiful machine whose moving parts are audacity and power. Suppose you heard that Quentin Tarantino wrote a scene in From Dusk Till Dawn in which Salma Hayek pours champagne down her leg and has an admirer lick it off her toes and then that Tarantino insisted he play the part of the toe-licker? Where does Tarantino the artist begin and Tarantino the chance-pe-dance exploiter begin? And to stay with Salma Hayek, what do we feel after reading that the relentless off-screen harassment that she endured from Harvey Weinstein ended with her being coerced into being nude with another actor during the making of Frida?
I read Alice Munro for the first time after her death, after the news came out that she had taken the side of her sexual abuser second husband rather than her youngest child. It is undeniable that Munro is brilliant, but oh boy, is it hard to read Vandals or some of her other stories without seeing her trying to dodge the dodgy stuff in her life. Perhaps you can separate art from an artist when you are doing an oil painting of a bowl of fruit, but not often otherwise.
As a young person, I had no illusions that Malayalam cinema, what we saw on screen, wasn't all about men. It's about what Malayali men thought, felt, experienced, laughed about, cried about, longed for. When Sreenivasan was acting, in his mannered, staccato delivery, his characters often mocked the bragging excesses of other men—the heroes. In Sreenivasan's screenplays, cinema often showed us how men affected women with their insecurities, fears and delusions. Still, Sreenivasan's movies were about men. And if the rest of Malayalam cinema wasn't also about men, it wouldn't have mattered. The world needs introspective, funny portraits of men.
As it stands, Malayalam cinema needed other cures given its total resistance to women becoming directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers... people with power. (At one point the industry's makeup artists union went on strike because a woman make-up artist wanted to join the industry.) Unsurprisingly, the Malayalam industry has produced work that relentlessly reflected whatever was clattering at the moment inside the heads of men.
One can read the Sreenivasan classic Sandesham as a troubling argument against collectivist action or a less troubling “hahaha politics is so stupid” with the greatest one-liners. One can always, always read his movies as a big, giant vote against self-pity. Sreenivasan despised the mopey, self-pitying Malayali man. His denouements always involved the self-pitier throwing off the feelings and choosing action.
I am someone who is chronically unable to separate the art from the artist— and not because I am so politically astute. The actor on the screen and his interviews and his photos and the three-line snippets about him in the backpages and his shoulders in a song all become the artist for me. And in the case of Dileep, that artist-shaped muddle that represents him in my head has always been about self-pity.
In the climax of Sallapam, Dileep's early hit, his character tells the spunky domestic worker who is in love with him that he can't marry her because of his poverty and ailing parents. Like a magician pulling the curtain to show you what lies behind, he unveils the room in which his responsibilities lie. Watching it, I remember thinking “are you competing with her?” Or maybe that is what I remember because that spunky domestic worker was played by Manju Warrier, the real-life spunky woman who would go on to become his first wife.
An actual IMDB description of Dileep's 1995 movie Kakkakum Poochakkum Kalyanam goes, “Kunjananthan thinks the only way out of his problems is to end his life by suicide and fails at it every time. Things change for him when he gets a job, and falls in love again but his whiny personality persists.”
Dileep in his work and his public life seemed to distill for me the least attractive parts of masculinity in Malayalam cinema. It turned the often brilliant, funny Ordinary Man of Sreenivasan's conception into the “I am just a poor guy who the world owes everything because I pout.” The kind of guy who just weeks after being cleared of charges of organising a kidnapping in a car (while everyone accused of being hired by him has been sent to prison) appears in Bha. Bha. Ba. In this movie, Dileep plays a kidnapper and makes violent sexually coloured jokes. It's like that OJ Simpson memoir that was amazingly titled, If I Did It. In this movie, Dileep has the immortal line, “Shouldn't I do at least this much to those who ruined my life?” Surely, this is the kind of line that we hope and pray others will remember us for when we are dead. What a nice saadanam.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.
Source: LiveMint
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