Production: Vijay Sethupathi Cast: Antony Pangu, Gayathri Krishna Direction: Lenin Bharathi Screenplay: Lenin Bharathi Story: Lenin Bharathi Music:Ilaiyaraaja Background score: Ilaiyaraaja Cinematography: Theni Eswar Editing: Kasi Vishwanath
The first 40 minutes or so of Merku Thodarchi Malai involves events that happen on a single day in the life of the protagonist Rangasamy akak Rangu (Antony). Rangu lives on the foothills of the Western Ghats, along the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border. We begin with Rangu being woken up in the wee hours of dawn. It is time for him to get to work. And we begin our travel along with him. He is a daily wage worker whose job involves picking up load (cardamom) from up the mountains and bringing it down to the village.
Lenin Bharathi takes his time to give us this daily routine of Rangu’s. Rangu picks up his friend Kethara, and they go along with a regular, and another from the plains, who is visiting a relative up the mountains. The pacing is deliberately slow, mirroring the hard climb that these characters are making. The man from the plains actually gives up after about a quarter of the way, opting to continue his journey after resting for some time. As Rangu and Kethara make their way further, now and then, we get shots that zoom out further and further until we see a bird’s eye view of the entire region (Theni Eswar’s evocative cinematography is one of the highlights of the film). We see settlements here and there among the hills, and absorb the distance that these characters walk every day.
Up in the hills, we are introduced to colourful characters, like Chako (Abu Valayangulam), the labour activist in the place, Kangaani (Anthony Vaathiyaar), the supervisor, Ravi (Aarubala), a greedy estate owner, and Bakkiyam (Sornam), who runs a tea shop. There is also the proud old-timer, who sniggers at the regular who still prefers to use donkeys to carry the load, boasts about his hill-climbing prowess in his youth and insists on carrying the weight by himself until his death.
What the director establishes in these scenes is not a narrative but a sense of the place and its people, who stick together and help each other out. Money seems to be secondary. They are fine with barter. We repeatedly see financial dealings where the characters never talk about the amount of money involved.
Ironically, the lack of melodramatic pathos in Merku Thodarchi Malai is its most dramatic tool. It is the story of people who were forgotten or left behind in our endeavour to ‘grow’. What is development and who are the beneficiaries? If this growth isn’t inclusive, is it growth at all? The film talks about communism and the times it has failed, capitalism and the lives it has ruined. A small-time farmer shifts to selling seeds and manure and ends up diversifying into several agro-finance businesses while another farmer loses his land and ends up as a ‘watchman’ to all this growth. Lenin doesn’t point fingers. No lengthy, single-take shots that talk about what ails the farmer either. He quietly bares it all and lets us ponder over the questions.
Merku Thodarchi Malai has been shot exquisitely — Theni Easwar’s lens captures the hills in all its glory. The camera often zooms out into aerial shots, as if to remind how minuscule we are in front of nature. Maybe, to jog the memories of the larger world about these tiny groups tucked away in the folds of nature, whose livelihoods seem to have been considered as ‘collateral damage’ for ‘greater good’. Easwar’s camera is skillfully honest, similar to Ilaiyaraaja’s minimalistic background score. I don’t remember anyone else capture death so poignantly, on the go, with not much musical manipulation. But the frames haunt us. These characters almost seem to surrender to what had fuelled their life — nature, money and faith.
A fair word of caution. Merku Thodarchi Malai is an honest portrayal of a livelihood that has begun to become extinct. Lenin’s honesty translates into no-frill cinema — it doesn’t go out of its way to ‘entertain’ you. There is no forced humour, no exaggerated drama, not much action, no duet songs. I am thankful to Vijay Sethupathi, the producer, for not compromising to market pressure and letting the film take the open, invested mind on an enriching journey. It is an experience meant to be watched on the big screen.
