Ariyippu vies for the Golden Leopard at Locarno

Filmmaker-writer-editor-cinematographer Mahesh Narayanan had never lived in Noida till he went there to work on his fourth feature film as a director, Ariyippu (Declaration). He visited the small factories—the world it is set in—and the homes of the workers and even wrote the script while sitting in Noida. “I wanted to be there and understand everything—the living and working conditions, pay scale, expenses, the food the workers ate. I didn’t think of it as research but realising the film through their lived reality and perspective,” he says.

Narayanan’s focus in the film is on a working-class couple—Hareesh (Kunchacko Boban, also the film’s producer) and Reshmi (Divya Prabha), immigrants from Kerala working in a medical gloves factory in the outskirts of Delhi. It is about all hell that breaks loose for them when a skill video of Reshmi, made for work visa application, gets mixed with footage from an old sex video resulting in untold mortification and humiliation. It also makes the secrets and lies and crimes and misdemeanours from the past come right back to haunt the present, even as newer instances of malfeasance begin to emerge.

The film had its world premiere on August 4 at the Locarno Film Festival where it is competing for Pardo d’Oro (Golden Leopard) in the Concorso Internazionale segment. It was way back in 1981 that Rabindra Dharamaraj’s Chakra had bagged the festival’s top award for India. Quite like Narayanan’s previous directorial ventures—be it Take Off (2017), C U Soon (2020) or Malik (2021)—Ariyippu is also rooted in the real. “I like picking up stories from my surroundings and am a big fan of documentaries,” he says. The inspiration for the new film came from a small article he had read in the newspaper five years ago about a woman bank employee approaching the Bombay High Court for a declaration stating that the person in the video circulating in her office was not her but a lookalike. It stayed at the back of his mind, travelled with him over time. “But every idea has to be reconceived with new situations and contemporary socio-political realities in mind,” says Narayanan. So, his avid interest in immigration stories made him bring in a new dimension to the script. But why the National Capital Region or the NCR as it is better known? “There are many people in Kerala who want to move to foreign countries for better salary and livelihood. Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad, NCR is a transit place for them while they apply and wait for the visa. They work on lesser jobs and lower salaries in such factories while the visa takes time to get processed,” says Narayanan.

Where Ariyippu marks a departure from Narayanan’s previous films is in how he eschews the tenets of mainstream cinema. “When I began thinking of how to mount the film, I decided to be honest with the subject and not add any commercial flavour,” says Narayanan. It offered him the freedom to add layers of other kinds—turn it into a study of characters, of the society and the economy.

The result is a highly authentic recreation of the mundane world of business owners and their workforce. It spins on the finality of human irrelevance in a system geared only for profit. Like Ivan Ayr’s Meel Patthar, the universe is as close as Indian cinema can perhaps approximate a Ken Loach.

There’s the stark “industrial mise en scène” of the factory and the claustrophobic, shabby residences of the workers and the endless workman’s toil. A world captured in its joyless raggedness—the man loading and unloading stuff, the woman testing the gloves in the inspection department, both weighed down by life, but slogging in the bleak drudgery. These struggles in the outside world go hand in hand with inner strife. There’s not much dialogue, yet a lot gets communicated through fleeting expressions, gestures and body language.

Grittiness marks the recreation of Hareesh and Reshmi’s marriage. The manipulated video doesn’t just threaten their jobs but relationship as well. Hareesh begins doubting Reshmi, while she feels betrayed by lack of support from him. Things begin disintegrating further when an offer is made to them as a cover up for a crime. Between their own
dreams and ambitions and call of the conscience the wife opts for the latter, she resists and defies the settlement thrown her way, while the husband has no qualms about compromising.

This element of the past impinging on the present and the opposing stance of the couple reminds one of the moral complexities and conflicts explored in many of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi films, especially in The Salesman (2016). “I am a big fan of Farhadi, and also Robert Bresson and Costa Gavras. I consider Farhadi, this generation’s Ingmar Bergman,” says Narayanan. But he also thinks that all his own films so far have dealt with marriage in one way or another.

What is worth appreciating is that in this deep dive into human nature in the film, it’s two feisty women who come up trumps. On the one hand are women who contribute to a conspiracy of silence around a crime, on the other are Reshmi and her female supervisor (played by Loveleen Misra), with their moral core intact, anomaly in an all too
compromised male cosmos. It’s for them to get to the roots of the wrongdoings in the factory. “We don’t appreciate and recognise the stubborn decisions that people often take. They stand by and don’t move away from them, come what may,” says Narayanan.

Narayanan set new paradigms for filmmaking during the pandemic with C U Soon (2020) that delved into issues of virtual relationships and privacy, cyber security and hacking and human trafficking. Regarded as India’s first lockdown film, it was set entirely in computer screens and made with iphone out of the homes of its cast and crew.

Ariyippu is set in COVID reality and was shot around Delhi during the Omicron wave though the factory itself was recreated in a set. He regards the 30-day shoot as his toughest yet. Actual workers were deployed for the background roles, while the actors themselves got trained in the glove factory to get a realistic feel. Almost everyone got COVID and shoot had to be stopped for three or four days, recalls Narayanan. However, despite the hardships he also enjoyed the shoot a lot. “The subject might be hard-hitting but the energy behind the film was a lot of fun,” he says.

The film marks many other firsts for him. Like working fluently with the seamless mix of Hindi and Malayalam language (almost 50:50 in the dialogue) and casting a terrific ensemble of actors from the Hindi film industry—Danish Husain, Loveleen Misra, Faisal Malik—alongside the stalwart Kunchacko Boban and seething and simmering Divya Prabha. Not only is Narayanan able to grasp NCR’s blue-collar working-class culture very well, but he also captures the weather to perfection. The grey, wintry feeling, the pollution and haze hanging heavy in the air become metaphors for the moral ambiguity and ethical obscurity at the core of the film. The chill also percolates deep in the heart of his protagonists.

He has worked with his usual collaborators and crew members, Sanu John Varughese behind the camera, yet again. “Everyone understands my vision very well even though Ariyippu is not my regular kind of cinema,” he says. The approach was to be simple and minimalistic and get as close to the people and the setting. Art director Jothish Shankar was crucial is capturing the North Indian details. Narayanan collaborated with Rahul Radhakrishnan, who has been his own student, on the editing. The film may not be a regular pacy thriller, but the scenes are dense with a sense of urgency even as they unfold slow and steady.

Ultimately, quite like CU Soon, Ariyippu is also about the many ironies that are endemic to the digital world. By erasing a video and putting up a declaration on the notice board, the chapter need not necessarily get closed. Nothing really goes away; the digital footprint stays and can come back to haunt another set of people in the future. That would be another stuff for another film.

Namrata Joshi is an independent writer and national award-winning film critic. She is the author of Reel India: Cinema off the Beaten Track (Hachette, 2019).

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.