Director: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan
Cast: Tovino Thomas, Kani Kusruti, Sudev Nair
In the opening shot of Vazhakk/Quarrel, the latest film by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, the sky and the earth reach for each other, a cinematic gesture that has become a staple in the filmmaker’s works. A whimsical folding of the cosmos and the mundane into one unit. As the camera eventually takes a steep dive to the ground into a misty rainforest, we meet the mundane. Siddharthan (Tovino Thomas), a young lawyer, is in his car parked in a landscape partially eaten by the quarries, on a bitter phone call with Lakshmi, his ex-wife (voice of Kani Kusruti).
The conversation reveals the details of a routine bad marriage, of a love that decayed and turned toxic over the years. The husband betrayed, deceived and abused, and the wife suffered. Lakshmi, who is always offscreen, is the custodian of the couple’s child, Thaara, who seems to be aware of the string of mistakes her father committed. In the next scene, Vazhakk pivots to another marriage story which appears to be shrouded in mysteries.
Sanal does not present the film as a cause-effect tale but as one open to multiple interpretations or aggressive objections from the viewer. Although the broad strokes in the two marriage stories and the presence of Tovino Thomas and Sudev Nair, both mainstream movie stars whose allure, body language, diction and gestures are familiar to the local audience, place Vazhakk in an in-between space, it creates an illusion of accessibility. The viewer is inside and outside the film and at the threshold, all at once.
