fuck yeah malayalam cinema

From this moment onwards, he would be preparing himself to resist our next arrival. In a way, isn’t that the greatest punishment he could get? DRISHYAM 2 (2021)

Between Natasha and Shiva. There was some sort of magic there. BANGALORE DAYS (2014)

Joshua: sorry..

Jenny: i know that you’ve eloped but i am hungry 

Maniyarayile Ashokan (Malayalam, 2020)

Antony Varghese as Vincent Pepe ANGAMALY DIARIES (2017)

Given the number of Malayalam films with dead, dying or “cured” heroines outweighs the number of heroines who retain their dignity and autonomy by a figure so large, the ideal that shapes a film like Sancharam is laudable, indeed necessary. Sancharam is able to provide the female viewer more than one route that female existence may take. Yet, Sancharam slights the compromises many women who love other women must make in marrying: Kiran is outraged by Delilah’s pragmatic offer of a secret relationship on the fringes of her marriage to Sebastian. The film-maker is clearly with Kiran’s high romantic refusal of such a ploy; heteronormativity itself may offer spaces for the enactment of female same-sex love and desire, as the case of Fire proves. An “emancipatory” lesbianism in comparison to a pragmatic lesbianism…

Sancharam, in fact, is misleadingly subtitled “the journey” - the physical journey that Sally and Nimmi undertaken in Desatanakkili Karayarilla is not even begun in this film. Kiran does indeed mentally travel from teacher’s pet to tainted lesbian schoolgirl, but Padmarajan’s film, despite its many politically incorrect or fantastic positionings, is able to suggest strategies for survival that are anchored in the everyday world we travel through. The girls are able to find a hostel - albeit with a kindly old gentleman who exemplifies the fantastic I mentioned above, almost an instance of deus ex machina, willing to take in two underage girls without a background check - take on assumed names and make a go of it. Pullapally arguable achieves what she sets out to when Kiran does not jump off the cliff. Pullapally’s voiceover on the DVD acknowledges that this was not the climax that she originally intended though - Kiran was to have died as per the original plan. 

However, in ‘saving’ Kiran, Pullapally is indeed making a very strong case for survival at all costs, continuity and endurance rather than naive idealism. Where there are hardly any positive representations of lesbians, each film that does not kill its lesbians off counts a great deal: we must thus credit Pullapally for what she does achieve in producing credible protagonists, making a powerful interruption in the politics of visibility by creating very visible and very dignified protagonists who are treated with compassion by their maker. The many homophobic castigations Pullapally received at various film screenings in Kerala, as also the various stratagems employed during filming, such as not telling people that this was to be a lesbian flim, all illustrate amply the personal courage required to make these interventions (DVD features). But unlike DKK, Pullapally’s film stops just short of pushing Kiran into this real world in which we so desire to take her measure; in denying us this opportunity to see her amongst other men and women, Pullapally places her film within what I shall call an ectopic lesbian narrative. Islanding Kiran and Delilah in a paradise on earth is in keeping with narratival strategies undertaken by a number of writers but at the same time, this islanding itself isolates Kiran from context, making her an emblem rather than a particular character, and making Sancharam an exemplum whose tale still needs telling.

Aneeta Rajendran, “In the realm of the (Un)Familiar : studies in contemporary lesbian Indian texts”