Why 'Visaranai' is a terrible choice for the Oscars?

Let’s not kid ourselves.We stand  zero chances of making it into the Best Foreign Film category of the Oscars, let alone win. We won’t win now.We won’t win in the near or distant future.
So let’s not start dancing to Priyanka Chopra’s Desi girl in anticipation.Quantico is as close as Bollywood gets to the Oscars.

It’s not that we don’t make Oscar-worthy films. We do. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was a perfect candidate to crack the Oscar code three years ago. Now there is Leena Yadav’s Parched.It serenades the Great Indian Poverty with such  persuasive power.But we won’t send films that make us feel good about life. During the year of The Lunchbox we sent Gyan Correa’s Gujarati film The Good Road which was about,among another things, 8-year old girls having forced sex with 40-year old men.

Is your stomach churning. Vomit is fine. It is the Indian reality.

The problem is not that such morbid reality is not acceptable to the Western audience. The problem is we are marketing squalor as excellence for the Western audience. It’s like slumming over Slumdog Millionaire. Danny Boyle’s film was unabashed poverty-porn. The Good Road and last year’s Oscar entry Mahesh Tamhane’s Court go deeper into Boyle’s slumming in pursuit of a misery that the Indian middleclass accepts as a way of life.

It’s real. But it’s not necessarily great cinema. Just a stark cinematic representation of  an egalitarian sensitivity does not procreate the kind of sensitivity that the Oscar committee seeks in cinema.
Vetrimararan’s  Visaranai is a graphic gruesome depiction of police brutality over four  hapless immigrant labourers picked up from the streets of Chennai. Evert thwack of the bamboo staff , every kick in the groin every punch in the teeth is lovingly recorded. It’s all very REAL.

But is realism Good Cinema? Sometimes, it is. Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Mira Nair’s Salaam Mumbai were solidly sublime cinematic representations of the Great Indian Poverty. These films elevated the squalor to  a cinematic summit.

Visaranai does nothing to make us feel anything but sickened to the core of our stomach .The heart is heavy at the end it could burst. It’s a coldhearted clinically sadistic portrayal of oppression, pivoted by a paucity of optimism. Not even a beam of light pierces the director’s kingdom of brutality. While the first-half of the disembodied film is composed of one  sadistic sequence of violence after another, the second-half is a clumsily crafted thriller with fast-racing cars cruising down busy motorways and cheesy politicians making deals which are ….well, no big deal.

Forget the Oscar. Visaranai is too indigenous to even make sense to the upperclass Indian to whom police lock-up is more a myth than a reality.Last year Oscar entry Court combed the legal system as manifested in the lower courts with such fastidious integrity that it felt like the guilt of oppression was passed on to the audience.

Visaranai doesn’t make us feel guilty. It sickens us with the violence .After a point we became as immune to the assault as the four protagonists .Every scream of pain takes us lower into the depths of despair.That’s not what cinema was supposed to do.