“When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy significance…With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.’
- Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Renji Panicker’s Mammootty starrer Roudram is a film that literally ‘says’ it all. It is a film that shouts its way to the end, with each character breathlessly hollering to each other and to us. They swear, fulminate, pontificate, sneer, admonish, preach, and plead but never speak. It is like watching a television news show on a sensational day, where the politicians, victims and commentators throw allegations at each other and raise insinuating remarks and innuendos – full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing. At the end of it all, one feels that it was all a performance, meant only to entertain us for the evening.
 Obviously,
like all Ranji Panicker scripts this film is also
about recent ‘political’ events and
actors, made and kept live by media. (The posters
of the film scream: “This film is not intended
to denigrate anyone, but to tear apart certain
masks!”) The narrative team gives us ‘stories’
that pretend to be true and are told in a manner
where fact and fiction, events and imagination
jostle. Working up the froth of political discussions
and scandals that are regularly churned out in/by
our public sphere and media, the film creates
a morality play of black and white forces. It
is seemingly all about shameless self promotion,
corruption, conspiracy and insatiable hunger for
power. Our scandal-mongering media have created
a situation where everything we seem to see and
hear has an ‘inside’ – one that
is hidden from public view – one that is
driven solely by the machinations of villains
of various kinds, especially those in politics,
business and bureaucracy. In a world that is totally
corrupt, there are only the villains, the preys
and the heroes. The hero will eventually punish
the corrupt, settle all the scores and restore
order. To sum up the story, it is the story of
an upright police officer, who is entrusted with
the job of investigating a crime, coming to realize
that the ‘idealist’ Chief Minister
himself had vested interests in raking up that
issue. But upbraided and thus ‘awakened’
to his duties by the words of the comrade-police
officer, he decides to back him in taking the
investigations to its logical end.
This genre of films in Malayalam that makes contemporary political events its raw material was made popular in the 80’s by the T Damodaran-IV Sasi team. But they came in a pre-television era when the political drama was not played out in the realm of visual media, but found their space only in the press. So in a way they were giving a visual version of the political drama that unfolded beyond our vision/view. And at the centre of those narratives were angry young men disillusioned with the system and its moral turpitude that forced them to take law into their hands. But in Roudram you have a middle-aged hero with a wife who dutifully sacrifices her profession to be with her crusader-husband, who is fighting a heroic battle (more verbal than physical) for society.
Many elements in the narrative have changed through
time. The T Damodaran narratives were populated
by a crowd of stars and that created a sense of
community and society as these characters came
from different walks of life. So, in whatever
crude manner, there was a sense of plurality and
diversity of society in view there. Now there
is a shrinkage in the diversity of characters
and despite their numbers. For instance, in Roudram
there is a battery of villains played by Vijayaraghavan,
Saikumar, Shammi Thilakan, Ranjit, Janardhanan
etc. But they all behave like clones. Similar
is the case with the shrinkage on the heroic side.
All the noble/heroic qualities have only one embodiment
here – the middle-aged hero, Narendran.
Likewise, compared to the earlier films, the importance
of female characters has also reduced; they are
nullities here, mere puppets, decorations or slaves
in the macho world they vegetate in. If they are
dutiful wives of the ‘good men’, with
the villains, they are decorative props. As a
result, characters in the film look like dummies
of themselves, like the narrative which is a dummy
of the petty political drama it pretends to ‘unravel’.
Is the tragedy of history repeating itself as farce here?
Dr C S Venkiteswaran, is a Kerala based
film critic who has won state and national awards
for film criticism. He is now Director, School
of Media Studies, Kochi, Kerala. He writes regularly
about film in various national and international
journals.
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