Four Women, Adoor Gopalakrishnan?s new film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival recently, won him applause and critical praise. It was shown in the ?Master?s section? along with works of eminent directors such as Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Manoel de Oliviera. ?Don?t treat the audience like idiots,? says Gopalakrishnan. Perhaps it is because of this attitude of his that the film has been considered a benchmark at the festival.
The Malayalam film Four Women (Nallu Pennungal) has a socially relevant theme. It deals with social positions, conflicts and identities of four women rooted as they are in native Kerala. The movie is based on eminent writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai?s short stories about four women at Kuttanad in Kerala?s Alappuzha district. Gopalakrishnan dares to show ?the rare purity? of four women in the village of Kerala. The film mirrors four elemental titles: The Prostitute, The Virgin, The Housewife and The Spinster. In each segment, a woman submits to a role a society decides for her. Each of the women offers a paradox of freedom and social bondage.
The film bears subaltern issues, cruel and tragic. The first story shows how Kunju Pennu is in an informal marriage with Pappukutty. They are desperately poor and live on the pavement until one day they are arrested by the police on a false charge of obscenity. In the second story we see how Kumari is married to a man from another village and how he consumes the last morsel of Kumari?s parents. Insulted, he never returns to Kumari who is thrown into social turmoil and shame. The other two women also face anger and one of them, who is barren, allows a surrogate stud to fill the gap. The other also does the same.
Reality has many faces, Gopalakrishnan believes. ?It could be anything. Sometimes a character, an incident, a newspaper report but it is only a starting point,? he says. While offering an analogy he has admitted that while making Anantaram, based on a real story, he happened to learn about a doctor who adopted a child from the hospital. He then did rejig the plot, as seen, develop it from the embryonic idea. Says he: ?It touches some chords inside you and then it grows from this spark?.
In Four Women, the characters are played by Nandita Das, Manju Pillai, Padmapriya and Geethu Mohandas. Originally the film was titled Moonu Pennungal (Three Women) but it was changed to Nallu Pennungal. As always, Gopalakrishnan loves to play with images. Says he: ?Images fall into two broad categories ? passive images and active images. By and large active images are the ones that have an immediate appeal and are of intense human interest?.
In selecting frame and idea to construct a film, Gopalakrishnan has a different take. He culls his materials from real life in the form of images but recreates ?a vista and vision? that is an off-shoot, not an extension of the original. This intricate process, according to him, is quite pronounced in the production of the cinematographic image. Says he: ?In fact cinema constructs and composes images against a virtual topography and landscape that is all its own creation?.
On the progress of good cinema in India, he once remarked: ?Nowadays there is such resistance to good cinema that I am surprised that youngsters still manage to make their own films. The media is neither inclined nor supportive, and a decent release is also out of question?.