Movie Musings
#2: ‘Koozhangal’ (Pebbles)
An anger-driven father, a bleak village, and a reluctant son — their journey to the mother’s village to ask her to return home.
The backstory in Koozhangal is understood because this is a normal day-to-day occurrence in the kid’s life. Its narration is done through long, unrelenting shots that tell the story of the lifetime of a people and a land in pursuit of water. Trauma is witnessed through the microcosm of the family and the destruction of fragile male ego.
Starting with its runtime of 75 min, which modern film viewers consider a boon, is tight and pacy. With the amount of distractions on hand, we require a tangible and strict movie watching experience. But the wholeness of the film is heartfelt at the end of its 75th min. Duration seemed irrelevant, this film broke conventional barriers. What’s considered as lagging or boring has been used to its strength. This shows the director’s conviction on his script and the confidence in his craft.
Koozhangal bagged the Tiger award and was nominated for several film festivals. Taking that into account, is this considered a parallel cinema or an alternate cinema? Only us viewers and critics get bogged down in this rabbit hole of labeling. More often than not, it proves to be a creative block to the story than letting it run free. All film directors want their movies to appeal to the masses. They want their stories to be heard in every household.
This is a simple story that depicts the South Indian rural landscape. Almost every mother, in any South Indian village, would have encountered this story at some point in time. That being said, this story has all “necessary” ingredients of a popular cinema — there was never a moment of lag on-screen, it dealt with a plethora of emotions and nowhere did it seem spoon-fed. The director’s reasoning for this script was simple — he wanted to do justice to the source of the story, which is the land and its people.
As an urban kid, born and brought up in a city, I felt a stark contrast in the day to day pacing of life. I was taught and encouraged to work 60 to 70 hours a week, which shaped my way of thinking and my social interaction from early adulthood. I don’t tend to see the point of interacting with someone if there’s nothing for me to gain from it. That’s how my mental state was conditioned. For someone like me, to see the protagonist walk 13km on the dusty land with dry, rocky mud, listening to each footfall with silence was unnerving. And rightfully so, that is the harshness of the malnourished land and its felt on our skin.
A lot of the scenes are laden with no dialogue or exposition, with the cinematography writing its own prose. Many scenes are filmed from a towering angle, shrinking the protagonist to an extent that it looks as if the land will swallow him.
We come across a few stories interspersed on their journey. One such sequence is when a visibly distraught mother gets down from a bus to breastfeed her baby in the middle of a barren land after a scuffle breaks out between two male passengers. The very next shot cuts to a closeup of a goddess statue with exposed breasts, surrounded by figurines of men praying to her. Another poignant scene is when we come across a family of two women smoking out rats from a hole. The shot lingers there for a moment so that the entire capturing and cooking process is registered. This brutality is life-sustaining in this harsh landscape.
From the minimal yet affecting dialogues to the rustic setting and grounded performances, the director seems to place an acute focus on making the film feel realistic. At no point in the film did the background score seem to overtake the tone of the script or be emotionally forceful. We know the music director is sensible in his craft through his way of using silence and ambient sounds. In a particular sequence, he uses the sound of an anklet to drape over the long arduous walk in the heat. After a minute or two of this sequence, the bells of anklet seemed to impart a touch of magical realism to the scene. It offers a means of catharsis to the characters, for their pacing rhythm is in tune with the bells’ sound and for a minute we sense the characters are at peace.
The father is alcoholic and abusive, but when he picks up his kid from school to start their journey he desperately asks the kid, “do you love me or your mother?” The father is irritable and hostile, but keeps his head down when he meets his kid’s teacher. Upon learning that his wife had returned home when he reached her village, the prospect of walking another 13km drives him mad with rage. But after returning home, his hunger and thirst overtake his rage. This dichotomy is beautifully shown through visual storytelling.
This movie is largely about the kid’s hope for a better future. He has his own way of punishing his father. He tears down the bus ticket to make his father walk the path his mother had walked. He throws away the matchbox to not allow his father to smoke. He picks up a shard of glass and aims the reflection of the scorching sun on his father’s bare back. It feels right when he assaults the father’s arrogant swag from this safe distance.
In the opening shot, we see the father throwing away the child’s dog toy. In the last scene, we see the kid returning home with a puppy and playing with it. In a sense, this movie could be a simple story of a lost puppy finding its way home. We were left with the scene of the kid removing a pebble from his mouth, so that the extra moisture in the mouth eliminates the deep feeling of thirst, and tossing it to his stack of pebbles.
The characters in the film do not go through an arc, nor do they gain any specific wisdom or have their lives transformed in a meaningful way. We are simply shown a 4-hour glimpse into their daily life to observe an average episode of trauma in a family. The mother will run away again; the father and son will make yet another trip; the kid’s stack of pebbles will continue to grow.
