Palunku: A mirror of our times

“When you were watching this film, an average of five minor girls would have been raped in India” This is the stunning last line of the Malayalam movie Palunku directed by Blessy, of Thanmathra and Kazhcha fame. Yes, this movie ends with a sentence, quite like the poignant novels we have read in the past. (This is almost similar to an article about Afghanistan written by the Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, titled Limbs of No Body, which starts with the sentence “If you read my article in full, It will take about an hour of your time. In this hour, 14 more people will have died in Afghanistan of war and hunger and 60 others will have become refugees in other countries. This article is intended to describe the reasons for this mortality and emigration. If this bitter subject is irrelevant to your sweet life, please don't read it.” Click here to read the article.)

Palunku is about the life of Monichan (played by Mammootty) and his family. He has a wife and two daughters aged 11 and 7. He is a hardworking farmer, though illiterate, who enjoys a very happy life with his family in a village in the eastern hills of Kerala. His life changes from its normal track when he came to know that he had to take his daughter to a school in a nearby town if he wanted to continue her education. So he started taking his children to the school in the nearby town everyday. There he meets people with cunning and other traits that he hasn’t seen before, yet fascinate him. Soman Pilla (played by Jagathi Sreekumar) is a man who has an uncanny knack of getting money in whatever thing he does. You have seen such a person in every town of Kerala. They come to you masquerading as tea shop owners, marriage brokers, autorikshaw drivers, agents of a zillion schemes, stationery shopkeepers, or lottery ticket vendors as Soman Pilla in this film. Monichan also meets a parallel college teacher (played by Nedumudi Venu) who takes him to the world of education. Gradually he decided to relocate to the town because of the lack transport facilities in their village.

So he takes a house in the town for rent and later sells his house in the village. He does not have a job and he wants to have all the facilities and consumerist pleasures of, well, his neighbor. Soman Pilla guides him to new but risky areas of money-making. He falls for those. But anyway he succeeds in getting whatever he himself, his wife and their children crave for. Slowly the happy atmosphere that had enveloped their family in the village begins to evaporate in the heat of their new life in the town. No more can they indulge in the meaningless talking that had provided so much unintended meaning to their life. They become, like most people in the cities, a fragmented island of their own.

Then Soman Pilla succeeded in persuading Monichan to deal with fake currencies. They did make a lot of money in it. But Monichan was forced to stay out of his house for some days. When he came back, he bought new gold necklace for his wife, a new washing machine, a much desired equipment for his wife, and new dresses for his daughters. But only one daughter is at home. The elder one has gone out for enquiring about him in Soman Pilla’s shop. It becomes dark. She is not back. Monichan frantically goes in search for her. But he couldn’t find her. The next morning police go to Soman Pilla’s shop and break open the lock. There they found her: brutally raped and murdered by a pervert. Monichan is heartbroken and so are the viewers.

No other director has managed to capture the state of Kerala society of these times as Blessy does through his films. Palunku is an emphatic confirmation of this. He may lack the artistic finesse and cinematic craftsmanship of some of the great Malayalam directors like Adoor and Aravindan. But he has a keen mind that captures the essence of the sickening changes in our society. The acting except for the case of heroine (a Telugu actress Lakshmi Sharma) is superb as one would expect from the likes of Mammootty, Nedumudi Venu and Jagathi. The film is studded with symbols of corruption and soullessness of our ever-changing society. Those who moan about the lack of quality films in Malayalam should watch this film. This one is for you.