GF reviews “Vidheyan”

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan (The Servile) is a masterpiece– an overwhelming vision of human bondage and the meaning of power stripped down to a violent and grim tale about a sadistic landlord and his squeamish indentured servant.

The film is a vision of hell as seen through the eyes of a repentant, weak Christian sinner. Gopakumar plays the titular servile, an impoverished Kerala migrant worker named Thommi whose journey is inextricably linked to his relationship with his master – a demonic force of nature named Bhaskar Pattelar played by Mammootty giving arguably his most commanding screen performance (if not the greatest – another candidate would be Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha). Mammootty gives Indian cinema its most potent villain in Pattelar, who in this imagined hell is certainly a fearsome satanic center. This is antagonist acting on the level of Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West.

As in Leone’s film, the setting here is a dusty town. The village, located in rural Southern Karnataka, is presented with a minimalist’s eye for construction. The men laugh and sneer, there are precious few women and ample doses of violence. Tanvi Azmi plays Saroja, Pattelar’s strong-willed, pensive wife and the only remnant of human kindness that orbits his universe. Her husband is a philanderer and a drunkard, hateful of anyone who questions his tyrannical will and in his wife, he sees a weakness that he wishes to extinguish. The narrative concerns the seduction and dominance of Thommi by Pattelar, who uses his abused servant to execute his every dirty deed. The servant becomes an extension of the master’s will and, as the story progresses, he grows increasingly attached to his master to a point where when the latter is injured, the former cries out in pain. The connection is disturbing in every implication – particularly in its allusion to the concept that absolute power penetrates and perverts not only the minds of those who wield it, but of those who suffer it.

Thommi’s religion is not an arbitrary facet of this story and only underlines Gopalakrishnan’s intent in offering up a universe that is hellish in the biblical sense. Cast out from the garden (presumably their native Kerala) and into the hands of a vicious being with no regard for human life, Thommi and his wife are a kind of Adam and Eve seduced and destroyed by Pattelar’s devil. In the film’s most expressive and memorable frame, Pattelar, lounging on his veranda, leans forward in his chair to speak to an underling. In the process, his head, in the foreground, partially obscures the skull of an ox which is mounted over a door frame behind him. The ox’s horns, however, are still visible in the background, behind Pattelar’s head, and in that one shot we are given an overt glimpse into the character’s soul. Pattelar sits on a lofty seat with a twisted, thick mustache and the surrealist illusion of horns jutting out of his skull – every bit the picture of the devil on his throne.

This is not a fable or a morality play. Goplakrishnan does not let the symbolism dominate or dilute the force of his vision, but instead, like the best of filmmakers, marries the astonishingly conceived form to a forceful narrative. The final shot of Thommi running towards a distant sunlight (after aiding his bruised tormentor on a last crash through the flames) is, for the battered protagonist and the viewer, a kind of deliverance. But what we grow more curious about are the possibilities that await him and his wife beyond that moment of presumed deliverance. The shot, in one respect, reminds one of the “flight of Apu” at the extraordinary ending of Ray’s Aparajito. The action of Apu’s walking, (like Thommi’s running) is something altogether transcendent. Whether or not it leads to transcendence is another matter. Justice – or symmetry – doesn’t seek out the aggressor alone. It often, perhaps, unjustly, seeks out his unwilling minions. The comparison with Ray’s masterpiece here is not a hyperbolic gesture – Gopalakrishnan earns it in what is some of the best film making this country has produced since the era of that unparalleled master.