Alone in A House
Movie: Sivapuranam (Tamil)
Dir: Arun Karthik
Sivapuranam reinstates the fact that a film can be more than its plot and meaning. Debutant director Arun Karthick weaves a surreal experience of journeying into the loneliness of it's protagonist's psyche. Sparsely dialogued and centered around a single character-- who rarely leaves his house-- the movie makes a statement about adaptability—that despite all odds, one would try to make up for what he’s missing.
The film is strange (the English title of the film being The Strange Case of Siva), for the protagonist's act of abstaining from his job of being a designer and shutting himself down to a life of alienation, for the sole purpose of editing and tinting the photograph of a woman whom he sees each night, is actually pretty weird. He’s in fact not attracted towards the girl, he’s just obsessed with the shaky picture of her that he took while she slid past him like a wind. There’s visibly no television in the home, neither is he succumbing to any other sort of entertainments; his elations are limited to occasional puffs of cigarettes and the visuals from his own projector that seems to immerse him into a world of its own.
He uses the projector either to stare at the image of the sinister-looking girl from the neighbourhood, or to flow with the waves of the ocean—with an ongoing video of waves emanating and crashing down on the wall of his own house upon which the projector light falls. Among the most memorable scenes from the movie is a moment when Siva (by now I would like to call him that) is staring out from his door, it’s raining outside, and while the rain induces a moody atmosphere in the air, the camera moves back to the shores of an inner room, where the virtual waves are dancing on.
With close up shots on a mango-- most probably smitten by a crow or a squirrel-- and tracking shots that crosses the house from front to back (this often happens repeatedly, reminding us of similar shots from Mani Kaul's Uski Roti and Sanju Surendran's Aedan), the film captures the repetitiveness and ordinariness of life.
If you are looking for answers and the logical culmination of events in Cinema, Sivapuranam might disappoint you. But, if you want to see a man whose loneliness drove him to have a hidden cam peep at the lady next door, go for it.👍
Comments
Post a Comment