A movie lover should understand its maker: Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Thiruvananthapuram: It was almost towards the end of the seminar ‘Celebrating 50 Years: The Cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’, that the veteran filmmaker walked in. “I kept away, because if someone wanted to criticise, they could do it (freely),” he said. However, the only criticism heard in the hall, in his absence, was against the ones who disapproved of ‘Pinneyum’. When the floor was open for comments, one gentleman said that today’s young generation had a tendency to find faults, and hence the criticism.
When DC asked Adoor what he thought of the negative responses to his latest film, he said “The ones who criticise have failed to appreciate the film in its true perspective. They should make an effort to understand what the filmmaker is trying to say. That’s a quality a film lover should have.” Unlike what some of them think, ‘Pinneyum’ is not Sukumara Kurup’s story, though it is inspired by an aspect of his life, Adoor said.
“It is about his greed, and a wrong notion we hold about what a good life is. There is this American concept of a good life, which comes with owning this and that, be it a house, car or telephone. But the parameter of happiness is not material possessions, but the love between people,” he said. Was Adoor trying to say that ‘Pinneyum’ carried a concrete message? Just an hour ago, film critic M.K. Raghavendra, in his keynote, had praised the ambiguity in Adoor’s films, which allowed interpretations. “He goes by instincts,” he had said.
Raghavendra had also talked about the complexity of Adoor’s characters. As an example, he had said, how a character could be miserly, but still good. He had compared that to Western music which uses concordant notes to produce harmony. Adoor said that this was because he would rather choose the specific. While commercial cinema would try to generalise and stereotype characters, he would want the viewer to see everything this character was.
“Specific is universal. When you generalise, it would be like Hindi cinema which hangs from nowhere. However we are rooted in our problems, situations and life. That’s when it becomes valid. When I see a Bergman or a Fellini, I see the country’s culture. When I see a film by a Japanese master, I see Japan’s interiors. That is the function of art. That’s when it becomes universal,” he said. One of the reasons why Adoor could get across to people across the world is his keen sense for music, according to Mehelli Modi, whose UK-based DVD company restored Adoor’s ‘Elipathayam’ (Rat Trap).
He said that once when soundtrack of a movie was not in good condition, Adoor spent his own time and effort producing the soundtrack. “Anyone else would have said, ‘Oh, this is enough’,” Modi said. Meena T Pillai, author of ‘Women in Malayalam Cinema’, referred to men in Adoor films as ‘masculinity in crisis’. “Adoor’s men are not half as interesting as his women. “The emasculated men cannot match up to the marvellous sensuousness and suppressed sexuality that women’s bodies seem to exude,” she had said.
