Swaham

aka My Own; Destiny 1994 153’(141’) col/b&w Malayalam d/co-sc Shaji N. Karun pc Filmfolk p/st/co-sc S. Jayachandran Nair co-sc Raghunath Paleri c Hari Nair m Raghavan K., Isaac Thomas Kottukkapalli lp Venmani Vishnu, Haridas, Aswani, Mullenezhi, Sarath, Gopi, Praseetha, Rudraprathapan, Gopalakrishnan

Stunningly photographed melodrama of a family in Thenmala on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. When the Brahmin Ramayyar (Haridas) dies, his wife (Aswani) has to raise their two children and look after the coffee shop that constitutes their only income. The shop is located near a countryside railway station whose manager offers them support. They are evicted by their landlord (Gopi) and the mother raises money to pay a bribe to get her son enlisted in the army. The son dies in a demonstration protesting against state corruption. A quotation from Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam announces the film’s intention to offer a new way of narrating a familiar Malayalam film plot, which would include all the detail that is usually discarded from such stories. The images change from colour to b&w as the story moves between the past and present, arriving at a tragic structure that furthers the director’s favoured idiom (cf. Piravi, 1988) of characters struggling to come to terms with the emptiness left by death.

Film