Murali Nair’s Arimpara, which I saw last night at the Seattle International Film Festival, is a strangely beautiful and unsettling film. It takes the form of a fable, about a man — a rural landowner in the south Indian state of Kerala — who one day discovers a mole, or wart, on his chin. In the course of the film, the wart grows and grows, until it becomes a gross, purulent excrescence with a demented cackle and a will of its own.
Arimpara is a mysterious film because of the way it resists simple categorization. Much of the film is naturalistic in style: we see the landowner’s daily life with his wife and his son, his religious observances and enjoyment of nature, and of course his servants, and the peasants who toil for him in the fields. The film conveys a sense of ordinariness, of tradition, of quotidian repetition, and of hierarchical class relations that go unquestioned by the people enmeshed in them.
But the narrative of the growth of the landowner’s wart disrupts this naturalism. At first, the wart is small, and its presence seems only to be a reflection of the protagonist’s narcissism: he spends much time looking at it in the mirror, but he resists suggestions that it should be removed through medical treatment. He prefers to use traditional herbal remedies, which he prepares himself, just as he prefers the traditional way of farming, and refuses to buy a tractor to work his land according to modern methods.
As the wart grows, though, and the landowner’s life falls apart — he’s abandoned by his wife and child, and by most of the servants — the stylistic naturalism of the film gives way to grotesquerie. Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, the tone becomes one of chintzy horror, with the very low-tech prosthetic effect of the wart rupturing any illusion of naturalism, and the plot careening into body disgust at the verge of the absurd. One is torn between revulsion (at the visceral excess, reminiscent of early Cronenberg, of the wart) and laughter (at the way the film flirts with campy excess, or at least sardonic black humor).
Nair’s visual style of elegant minimalism — his careful frame compositions and his use of shadows — remains beautiful throughout; but by the end of the film, this elegance of presentation has come into total conflict what what is actually depicted within the frame. This dissonance is what drives the film: the horror story seems to be allegorical, while the setting and background work in social realist terms. The film at once moves us by absorbing us into the social setting, and alienates and distances us with its tackiness and artificiality. This conflict short-circuits any obvious responses to the film, and forces us into a sort of fascinated emotional turmoil.
I’m not sure I have the cultural context to flesh out the film’s allegorical meanings: the growth of the wart seems to have something to do with the landowner’s traditionalism, his superstitious reverence for the past and unwillingness to embrace the new; and it also seems to have something to do with the class privilege that he takes for granted, and that he has inherited from his much more violent ancestors (we are told several times about a knife, with which his grandfather — I think — both shaved off body hair that displeased his mistresses, and killed peasants who dared to challenge him). But beyond that, I don’t really know (there’s a final metamorphosis, which I will not describe here, but which raises still more questions about the entire allegorical import of the film).
Arimpara
Murali Nair’s Arimpara, which I saw last night at the Seattle International Film Festival, is a strangely beautiful and unsettling film. It takes the form of a fable, about a man — a rural landowner in the south Indian state of Kerala — who one day discovers a mole, or wart, on his chin. In the course of the film, the wart grows and grows, until it becomes a gross, purulent excrescence with a demented cackle and a will of its own.
Arimpara is a mysterious film because of the way it resists simple categorization. Much of the film is naturalistic in style: we see the landowner’s daily life with his wife and his son, his religious observances and enjoyment of nature, and of course his servants, and the peasants who toil for him in the fields. The film conveys a sense of ordinariness, of tradition, of quotidian repetition, and of hierarchical class relations that go unquestioned by the people enmeshed in them.
But the narrative of the growth of the landowner’s wart disrupts this naturalism. At first, the wart is small, and its presence seems only to be a reflection of the protagonist’s narcissism: he spends much time looking at it in the mirror, but he resists suggestions that it should be removed through medical treatment. He prefers to use traditional herbal remedies, which he prepares himself, just as he prefers the traditional way of farming, and refuses to buy a tractor to work his land according to modern methods.
As the wart grows, though, and the landowner’s life falls apart — he’s abandoned by his wife and child, and by most of the servants — the stylistic naturalism of the film gives way to grotesquerie. Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, the tone becomes one of chintzy horror, with the very low-tech prosthetic effect of the wart rupturing any illusion of naturalism, and the plot careening into body disgust at the verge of the absurd. One is torn between revulsion (at the visceral excess, reminiscent of early Cronenberg, of the wart) and laughter (at the way the film flirts with campy excess, or at least sardonic black humor).
Nair’s visual style of elegant minimalism — his careful frame compositions and his use of shadows — remains beautiful throughout; but by the end of the film, this elegance of presentation has come into total conflict what what is actually depicted within the frame. This dissonance is what drives the film: the horror story seems to be allegorical, while the setting and background work in social realist terms. The film at once moves us by absorbing us into the social setting, and alienates and distances us with its tackiness and artificiality.
I’m not sure I have the cultural context to flesh out the film’s allegorical meanings: the growth of the wart seems to have something to do with the landowner’s traditionalism, his superstitious reverence for the past and unwillingness to embrace the new; and it also seems to have something to do with the class privilege that he takes for granted, and that he has inherited from his much more violent ancestors (we are told several times about a knife, with which his grandfather — I think — both shaved off body hair that displeased his mistresses, and killed peasants who dared to challenge him). But beyond that, I don’t really know (there’s a final metamorphosis, which I will not describe here, but which raises still more questions about the entire allegorical import of the film).