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Kottukkaali: PS Vinothraj Returns With A Powerful Second Feature

<em>Kottukkaali</em> is another winner from PS Vinothraj, its Berlinale selection is hardly a surprise for it packs so much in so little, in a film language that is at once accessible and original.

Aditya+Shrikrishna

Aug 22, 2024

Promo posters for Kottukkaali.

PS VINOTHRAJ in an interview with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin said that the idea for his film Kottukkaali came from a poem in Kuruntokai the anthology of Tamil Sangam-era poetry, more than two thousand years old. It is quite possibly the one by Sangam-era Avvaiyyar, Kuruntokai-23, in which the heroine’s friend subtly suggests to the sorceress that the woman she is treating is not possessed, as her family believes, but is in love. The poem describes a hilly, green landscape, and we see that in the frames of Kottukkaali as well. The family in Kottukkaali believes that the heroine, played by Anna Ben, is possessed. She looks straight with powerful eyes that conceal great longing and tragedy. There is hope and fight in them. She does not speak. It's a silent rebellion.

PS Vinothraj returns with his sophomore film. Kottukkaali premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival under the title "The Adamant Girl". Like his debut feature film Koozhangal Kottukkaali is also a film constantly in motion. Koozhangal unfolds as an unwilling, laborious journey of a father and son. Kottukkaali is a road movie where an ensemble, a family, travels in a tiny motorcade for an exorcism at their family deity’s temple. Vinothraj’s cinema is a cinema of movement. Even when the camera is still the events are kinetic and ideas in flux. Nature is integral to his filmmaking. The sun, the different animals, land, hills, foliage and the sky, all of them speak in his cinema. Water flows as people wrestle. Leaves rustle as vehicles pass. A farce unfolds as two men look for a bar under the sun. A fierce bull halts the journey, but a young girl’s resounding voice saves adult men. A cremation ground is overgrown as two men discuss lost opportunities and how a man from their caste has done well in life and they must be proud, nonetheless.

The family is on its way to meet the seer to exorcise the demon out of the woman. The woman who, according to them, committed the folly of falling in love with a man from an oppressed caste. Apart from Soori who plays Pandiyan, the woman’s maternal uncle, the cast is peopled by new faces—non-professionals, the filmmaker’s relatives or people who were part of a similar real incident. The cohort has Pandi, his sister (Sai Abinaya as Rani is fantastic!) and her husband, the woman and her parents, cousins with their own history of feud and regrets within the family. A couple of two-wheelers and an auto rickshaw provide transport as they make the long, often eventful journey. The only person from the family who contains a shade of sympathy for the girl is her mother.

Kottukkaali has no background score and the only music it allows is some diegetic film songs that play during a girl’s puberty event procession. We hear Kizhakku Cheemayile’s 'Maanooththu Manthaiyile' as the maternal uncle walks towards the function. The event and the song, a popular hit throughout Tamil Nadu, reinforces the relationship Pandi and Meena (Anna Ben) share, and how tradition does not let Pandi rest easy. The film is a tug-of-war between the modern and the ancient, how people hold on to the vestiges of old practices—this relationship is just the beginning and casteism the larger structure—despite living an ostensibly urban life in nature’s lap in 2023. Things change, like the song itself as the procession reaches the event venue, travelling twenty-five years ahead to 2018’s 'Othaiyadi Pathayila' composed by Dhibu Ninan Thomas for Kanaa (2018) but the lyrics still extoll the same relationship.

Vinothraj’s filmmaking veers between still images and a lively camera (cinematography by Sakthivel B) that follows characters for more than a couple of minutes. Roadside stone idols watch these events in silence. It captures master shots and a mid-shot of a composition as if making a voyeur out of us to make up our own minds about these men and women. He also uses point-of-view shots. Just as the film deflates to an eerie discomfort, he puts the camera right where Pandi is sitting in the auto, in front next to the driver, the view from his vantage point with Meena’s face eclipsing the auto’s mirror. He then switches over to Meena’s vantage point with the view of Pandi’s back. They are not looking at each other, but as she begins to sing along to 'Othaiyadi Pathayila' the energy erupts and the film finds a grand release of all the rage not only within Pandi but the whole family. Vinothraj is brilliant at composing and building such moods, he knows when to feed the tension, when to simmer and when to cool down. There is even what looks like a split-diopter shot—of the young boy, Pandi’s nephew, and the rooster in the foreground and Meena in the background.

Every character in the ensemble is there for a reason. The cousins who are willing participants but are dispensable to the main family. They go off course searching for a wine shop and gossip and speculate about Meena. The mother, the sisters—one of them on her periods walks away from the road to change sanitary pad. The men are free to roam around, and they relieve themselves right in front of the world, their urine sounding off on flotsam and jetsam, their freedom elastic and immeasurable. The women have no such comforts. Even the girl who takes her bull away might be spirited but tells the animal that it is her only companion. The sister’s child is a grave warning for the future we build with our actions. Vinothraj is an astute, observant filmmaker, he knows that the issues that concern him are class-agnostic. When we reach the seer’s place, we see a couple of cars, even an expensive one, belonging to families who are there for the same purpose. Anna Ben has a single line of dialogue in the whole film but her face, her eyes, the faint smile and the silent outrage speak a thousand words. Soori, who has played the comic version of Pandi a hundred times, plays the more real, sinister version and hits the right registers. Kottukkaali is another winner from PS Vinothraj, its Berlinale selection is hardly a surprise for it packs so much in so little, in a film language that is at once accessible and original.