Catholic India's 'Master of Chaos'

10/12/23 • 82 min

Introducing a director you almost certainly haven't heard of - but who is well worth getting to know. Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of the major artists of a new movement that has developed over the last decade in the Malayalam film industry - that is, the cinema made in Kerala, the region where India's Christians have lived for many centuries.

All of Pellissery's films are set within Indian Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages.

Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists.

James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre:

Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity.

Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles:

Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT

Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords

Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre:

Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles:

Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT

Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords

Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Previous Episode

The Age of Innocence (1993)

The Age of Innocence may come as a surprise to those who associate Martin Scorsese with movies about gangsters. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, it's a sumptuous period romance set in late-19th-century Manhattan high society. Intriguingly, Scorsese described it as his "most violent film", though not so much as a punch is thrown: the violence portrayed is interior and social, not physical, in this depiction of a romance thwarted by the constricting social norms of the upper class.

Scorsese faced the challenge of depicting a society in which, as the narrator puts it, "the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" - and so the director cannot rely on characters stating things outright. His great accomplishment is that the film nonetheless reaches an operatic pitch of emotion, keeping the viewer on seat-edge. This is done not only through outstanding performances (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder), but also by camera movements conveying repressed passion, by light and color, and by the gorgeous Elmer Bernstein score.

For all that, if the film merely depicted the cruelty of social norms and mores stifling forbidden love, it would be of limited interest. Yet as the story develops, it doesn't allow itself to be reduced to a critique of the past. Indeed, though not without ambiguity, it shows the value of strong social rules and institutions - because often, if we follow our passion, we destroy ourselves and others.

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Next Episode

Wise Blood (1979): John Huston's film adaptation w/ Katy Carl

Katy Carl, fiction writer and editor-in-chief of Dappled Things, joins the show to discuss the 1979 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, directed by John Huston and starring Brad Dourif.

Links

Katy's short story collection, Fragile Objects https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p136/Fragile_Objects%3A_Short_Stories_by_Katy_Carl.html

Dappled Things https://www.dappledthings.org/

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