The Rat-Trap: Pure and Delightful Cinema review

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Often hailed as the successor to Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan may not agree with this label. But the fact is that he is one of the very few auteur-directors in India, a tribe which is shrinking. Creating cinema out of conviction rather than any compulsion, and at a pace that is more than leisurely, he was one of the earliest helmers to take cinema away from the formula-driven song-and-dance fare. Three years after Mrinal Sen's "Bhuvan Shome" (Mr Shome) caused a cinematic revolution of sorts in 1969, Adoor's "Swayamvaram" (One's Own Choice, 1972) reaffirmed that the Indian New Wave was here to stay and grow.  His next, the 1977 "Kodiyettam" (The Ascent), was a box-office success, despite its lead actor, the late Gopi, playing a balding, middle aged and shabbily attired hero!

Adoor draws his inspiration from his Kerala roots and makes movies in his native Malayalam about real people, real issues and real dilemmas. Surviving in a sea of big sharks that have been devouring small, intimate cinema of the kind he believes in and creates, he studies the individual to illuminate the complexities of the larger community he belongs to. Born in 1941 at a time when the feudal system was falling apart and along with it the joint family and the matrilineal household, he was affected by these changes. It is not surprising that his cinema should often reflect these.

Gopalakrishnan's 1981 Elippathayam or The Rat-Trap is a classic example of this. Set in the 1960s, it is his most poetic work that studies protagonist Unni (played by the late Karamana Janardhanan Nair), who clings to the vestiges of a social order that has but disappeared. Utterly selfish and uncaring, he drives one of his sisters to run away from home, possibly with her college teacher, and another to a life of lonely spinsterhood and slavery. In the end, he crumbles caught as he is between a debauched past and a present that has changed beyond his recognition or understanding. Withdrawing into a small room - like a rat does into a hole - he further insulates himself from the real world. The rodent that we see being caught in a trap metaphorically reflects the story of Unni who virtually sinks into paranoia.

Elippathayam's Unni, played by Karamana Janardhanan Nair in probably his life's best role, is a middle-aged, greying, selfish man representing a disintegrating feudal order. He remains unaffected and unmoved, even disdainful, of the socio-economic changes around him. These have altered equations between classes even in remote villages, but Unni clings to his private space in his ancestral house, stepping out but rarely. He keeps away from women and sex.  Wimpish in character, he takes to his heels at the slightest suggestion of sex from a woman. There is a wonderfully illustrative scene in a cashew grove, where Unni is accosted by a working-class woman, who is apparently attracted to him. The man cowers. In another scene, Unni is seen walking to a marriage, but mid-way he finds he cannot cross a small puddle. He returns home without attending the ceremony. In yet another instance, he refuses to budge from his bed when coconut thieves are out there in his grove in the middle of the night.

The movie ends dramatically: Unni is forced out of the room where he had shut himself, carried to the village pond and thrown into it. He rises out of the water looking like a rat, all wet and shaken. A simile is apparent here to the earlier scenes of Sridevi carrying a rodent in a trap and drowning it in the pond. However, unlike the four-footed creature, Unni emerges from the water. Has he got a new lease of life shorn of feudalistic excesses?  The film, like Swayamvaram, ends with what I call a teaser. It is for us, the viewers, to wrack our brains and come up with answers. The climax lends itself to debate.

The first of Adoor's films in colour, "The Rat-Trap" is one of his most disturbing work where he probes human ties in a moribund social structure, showing us how Unni, stubbornly refusing to see and feel change, turns the feudal master-subject subjugation into another form of oppression, that over a weak woman, sister Rajamma (portrayed by T. Sarada) in this case.

Honoured by the British Film Institute in 1982 as "the most original and imaginative work", "The Rat-Trap" was released some months ago on DVD by Britain's Second Run DVD.  Which specialises in bringing out important and award winning movies from across the world. Second Run films encompass many genres and languages, and caters to a niche market, to all those who seriously care about meaningful cinema.

This seems like a very welcome beginning, given the fact that while Ray's movies are freely available on VCDs or DVDs, Adoor's, baring two of his 11 features, are not. With a growing awareness in India of a cinema that goes beyond Bollywood or the crass commercial, his films have an audience that is growing and is not necessarily confined to those speaking Malayalam. Apart from an engaging style, his cinema deals with a variety of subjects, such as unconventional relationship (One's Own Choice), destabilisation in domestic space (The Ascent), the dynamics of political change (Mukhamukham or Face To Face, 1984) and the guilt of a hangman (Nizhalkkuthu or Shadow Kill, 2002). Yet, his vision is uniformly personal and treatment itself wonderfully visual.  And these come from a master moviemaker whose passion well into his youth was theatre, not film. Yet, unlike much of Indian cinema, Adoor's work remains pure cinema. And delightfully so.

First appeared in Sight & Sound