Jallikattu
Jallikattu is a genre film even if Lijo Jose Pellissery didn’t really set out to make one. Lijo knew he was making an experimental film because he uses a butcher’s buffalo that runs amok through a remote Kerala village as a metaphor to get across many layers of social issues.
The film has one of the most stunning opening sequences I have ever seen. The bravura opening, cut superbly into a staccato montage set to the sound of ticking clocks, deliberately merges all the film’s main characters, which you don’t know yet — the butchers, the outlaws, wife-beating mid-level police officers, and callous food-obsessed landowners, into one deeply disparaging idea of small-town Indian manhood. Varkey, the village butcher, orders the slaughter of a buffalo for an engagement party of a local bigwig’s daughter, but something goes amiss and his men botch the job and the animal escapes, causing many a mayhem in the village, forcing them to go on a lockdown. The village menfolk arrange a posse to recapture the buffalo.
The simmering tension in the village is now brought to a boil by the arrival of Kuttachan, a local folk-hero bandit, who was driven from the village in part due to the machinations of Varkey. The pursuit of the buffalo thus becomes a proxy mission for establishing alpha male status between these two.
With Girish Gangadharan’s absorbing imagery that captures torch-bearing pursuers stippling the nighttime jungle and the crowding pursuers gathering round the lip of a well — shot from below, the flames above form a ring of fire that looks like glowing iris of an evil eye, with Prashant Pillai’s absolutely grand and deliberately intrusive musical score, and most importantly with Renganaath Ravee’s artistically baroque sound design (How magnificently weird are those inhaling/exhaling sounds), Lijo Jose Pellissery pulls off a cinematic heist in 91 minutes.
The word “Jallikattu” may be defined by a spectacle in which people try to grab a bull’s hump after it is released into a crowd, but Lijo Jose Pellissery’s film uses Jallikattu loosely to explore man’s inevitable savagery.
The buffalo isn’t let loose in this story, but it escapes. Some men who are tasked to find it are certainly not happy about it. But eventually, every man in the village and its surroundings arms themselves to go in search of the buffalo — some to steal the meat, some for vanity of their manhood, and others because they simply want to be inside the craziness.
It’s 91 minutes of fever-pitch, adrenaline-soaked vortex of social issues revealing horror drama. From deconstruction of the male id to a hubristic descent into hell, the movie is fast paced for the most part. Even when the film slows down a bit, it is to show the festering grudges and old allegiances that have been growing for years.
The certifiably insane final 15 minutes leaves you gasping in awe. And as strangled gasps of infernal choirs sing and whose reverberations echo through your ears, what you see on screen is a mountain of barbaric, murderous, writhing manhood covered in mud and blood, wrestling a forlorn-looking buffalo to ground.
Jallikattu is one of those rare apocalyptic cinematic rides through hell that reveals the worst of mankind and the best that Indian cinema has to offer.
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Note: I had seen this movie a while ago. But revisited it recently as the award season is upon us and this movie is India’s official entry for Oscars 2021.
I am not into predictions business, but if I were, I would predict that this movie would make the cut to be one of the 5 nominees under the “International Feature Film” category.
