Society/Art: Some Infantile Views of an Old Man on Seeing Blessey's Pranayam

It is easy to reform and revolutionise the society-contesting its conventions, defying its norms and sabotaging its values-but applying or more tersely, repeating (of course, with differences!) the same logics and practices to and in the generic field of an art-form is not that much easy-going. This is the initial and ultimate impression Blessey’s Pranayam has left in my mind. The movie tells and to some extent, celebrates the reunion between a woman and her ex-lover-husband with the consent of her present husband. The film attempts to explore the avenues of conducting multiple relationships; husband, wife and her ex-lover-husband. Setting aside the needs and desires of the flesh and body, this democratisation of human relationships moves along the axis of amity, friendship and camaraderie. This thread of the movie can be considered as an instance of radical break in the backdrop of Kerala society where age old notions of purity, loyalty and chastity still exercise determining roles in matters related with marriage and all other forms of man-woman relationships. However, the climax of the movie shows Jayapradha dying at the hands of Anupam Kher, her ex-lover-husband, thus yielding herself to the Laws of Popular Movie Dynamics according to which the Other Woman is to be killed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Narrative Crisis of the Communist Movement in Kerala

It can be safely said that the Communist Movement in Kerala is bereaved of a genuine and authentic form of narration of its own. In case it owns one that it owes  to the camp of its enemies; real and imagined. today, its official ideologues and the sympathetic-emotional followers of the Movement say that there was a past in which the leaders and followers of the Movement alike made selfless sacrifices for the common-good of the society, well-being of the Proletarians and finally, for the healthy development of the Movement. Here the thread of the narrative is much obvious; that they posit a "golden age or "past" of the Movement. here the crisis is two fold; in the first place, the form of narration itself is not of Communist and the second one is that the "Meaning" of the narrative is unmapped in the annals of history. let's expand the first one,namely, the form of narration, a movement that is pledged to the Teleological-Linear growth of history resorting...
Read more

Aphorisms of Non-entities and Series of Non-Situations

1. We deny ladders and places to some writers on account of their unnatural inclinations towards romantic sentiments and sensibilities. P. Padmarajan is one among them; but perhaps he may be the one and only writer, as per my little knowledge, who considers Man as an unfathomable riddle (to put in one of his favourite terms, “Prahelika”) consisting of labyrinthine knots and NOTs. Really a death blow to the Freudian advocates of female Histeria. 2. Another romantic who drives my attention is, of course, K. Surendran who in Maranam Dhurbalam makes an astounding remark that a posted letter does never belong to the post-box. Here, the poet-protagonist is describing his first child. Though she was conceived in and delivered by his wife, it actually belongs to his lover Mayamma. 3. Even the most subversive and bohemian forms of artistic expression could not disown the Oedipalised strategies of familialism. When Salvador Dali became unfavourable to the dons of Surrealistic Syndicate, they be...
Read more

Zizek:The Aerial Photographer of Nothingness

Slavoj Zizek, the Yugoslav based psycho-analytic thinker is slowly becoming accepted as a sensitive-sensible defender-observer of Third World colonised territories. As a thinker and more as a writer I do have apt and due respect for him. But the common thread of his writing appears to me rather funny and to some extent evokes laughter. This thinker will start with describing the Real Politik forms and contents of the French Revolution with the aid of tools adopted from Kant, Fischte, Hegel and Schelling and in the very next passage he will jump onto the problematics of perspectives embodied in the vision of Strether in Henry James’ The Ambassadors and then he will present an anecdote gleaned from the off-screen peripheries of the battlefield of either First World War or the Second World War which will mostly be the story of sexual jealousy between hubby and his wife and most likely the protagonist will be a Jew!!! The fourth passage will talk about the dynamics of vision involved i...
Read more