The rising matriarchs of Mollywood

Anjali Menon’s first venture as director is Manjadikuru, a coming-of-age film set in the ’80s. One of the main protagonists is a 10-year-old ‘Gulf kid’ who returns to his hometown in rural Kerala to attend his grandfather’s funeral.

Filmmaker Shalini Nair’s debut indie film Akam is about the slow mental degeneration of a disfigured man who suspects that his beautiful wife is a celestial being, a yakshi that takes the form of a woman to seduce men and drink their blood. While Menon spent her formative years in the Gulf, Nair spent the first 18 years of her life in Trivandrum. Menon's next movie as scriptwriter was about the bond between an aged man and his grandson, strengthened by their shared love of food. Nair is currently scripting a political thriller. The two women appear to be markedly different from each other. Yet, they are tightly bound by one factor: They abhor being called ‘women directors’.

Nair is more vocal about her resentment. “There is no need to harp on the fact that we are ‘women directors’,” she says, calling the distinction a handicap. Menon believes that the “film is far more important”.

Truth is, the Malayalam film industry, despite its illustrious list of films and a discerning audience, is yet to boast of strong female filmmakers. Nair and Menon are rare exceptions, agrees Beena Paul Venugopal, artistic director of the International Film Festival in Kerala. “There are very few women directing Malayalam feature films. Last year at the festival, we had only one film. This year, I am not even sure whether we have one. I see a lot of women becoming assistant directors, but I don’t know how many of them will become directors.”

That Manjadikuru is set in the 80s is not a coincidence — Menon wanted to portray a Kerala whose social and political fabric was unravelling. “There was a huge shift in values then. With the oil boom in the Gulf, migration was at its peak in Kerala,” explains Menon.

Nair conceived Akam after having read the popular 1967 Malayalam novel Yakshi by Malayattoor Ramakrishnan. She decided to adapt the novel to suit contemporary times. In the novel, the handsome hero is a professor who meets with an accident which leaves him scarred, both physically and mentally.

Later, he meets a mysterious, beautiful woman and marries her. But soon, he suspects his wife is a yakshi – their dog cringes under her pat and his neighbour suffers a miscarriage (yakshis are supposed to have a fetish for foetuses).

In Akam (the movie is not a faithful rendition of the novel), Nair decided to focus on urban isolation over one of the main concerns of the 60s — the battle between faith and science. It was Ramakrishnan’s almost prescient theme of the breakdown of communication between a couple that interested Nair. “In the ’60s, it was unusual for a couple to deal with their problems alone. Relatives would intervene before the problem escalated. The novel acquires a new meaning in this decade,” says Nair.

Almost a decade ago, filmmaker Suma Josson experimented with an idea and narrative technique that was considered avant-garde in her 1998 film Janmadinam, which evoked extreme reactions.

The protagonist Sarasu (Nandita Das's first role in a Malayalam film) was an unhappily married TV reporter pregnant with her lover’s child. Moreover, Janmadinam followed a non-linear narrative style. “Some people wanted a linear method of storytelling. The audience had to draw their own conclusions.” She, too, finds being labelled a ‘woman director’ amusing. “No one calls a woman who makes a documentary 'a woman documentary maker’, right?”

When Menon called a prominent actor for a role in Manjadikuru, he found the idea of a woman director offering him a film so unbelievable that he disconnected the call, thinking it was a prank.

It was only later, after he searched for Menon on the internet, that he called her back. “I went to meet the owner of a location for my movie. When he saw me, he asked, ‘You are the director? Are you sure?’,” says Menon. “He asked me my details – the courses I'd studied, my family ... If I were a man and had just staggered into the location, he wouldn’t have asked me these questions. All I can say is that he missed out on featuring the location in my movie.”

Once on set, the cast and crew’s sense of anticipation lasts as long as the first shot, says Menon, describing herself as a director who respect’s an actor’s craft. And Nair? “Well, my cast and crew called me Stalini,” she says. “I guess that answers it all.”