Death, not the last frontier!

Settum Aayiram Pon (செத்தும் ஆயிரம் பொன், 

Even after death, worth a thousand sovereigns, Tamil; 2020)

Netflix

We paint our faces to make them presentable to the outside world, just like how we dress our dear departed as they leave on their journey to the other side. A make-up artist does that to make the actors look desirable. The undertaker does the same - to showcase the deceased so that the mourners can only see a pleasant looking corpse; devoid of the pain and misery of the tail end of his life.

In a way, life and death are the same. A make-up artist and an undertaker do the same job, masking the unpleasantness of reality. Like a birth which is celebrated with revelry, so should death. The joy of the cry of a newborn child is comparable to the wailing of the aggrieved mourners.

In most Eastern cultures, deaths are noisy and long affairs. The graphic display of emotions and rituals are actually ways to help the relatives resolve the separation issues and put closure to the death of a family member.

This film reminds me of the many Tamil films made in the 1980s with the villages as their backdrop. Like those movies, the actors are generally newcomers, and the theme is something intertwined with the traditional village folk practices. Here, the filmmaker narrates about the meeting of a grandmother and her granddaughter and the handling of the issues that kept them apart. The grandmother is the official 'village mourner', someone assigned to create the tone of melancholy in a funeral by belting rhymic songs interspersed with playful use of words in painting the deceased's life achievements and setting the mood of loss.

The granddaughter, a make-up artist from Chennai, is summoned to come to the village to settle some property issues. She grudgingly comes. Her parents had bad blood with the villagers and had to leave, hence, the resentment. The granddaughter was apparently married off at the age of five to the opposition of her mother. The supposed husband is the one who dresses the dead. In a way, applying make-up is the family tradition, one for the living and one for the departed.

Because of delays in the paperwork of the land transfer, the granddaughter has to stay behind. This becomes an opportune time to rebuild the broken bond and her understanding of the village practices—a great movie with natural acting. The spoken dialogue may appear vulgar, but we have to admit that is reality. Nobody bothers with niceties in real life. The style of photographing is surreal, as if the viewers are there in person witnessing the charade. A memorable scene is when a two-timing husband dies in the embrace of his lover, and the two women of his life fight over to perform the final rites. This commotion is reminiscent of a moment in a 2009 Japanese movie, 'Departures', where a closet crossdresser is wrongly dressed in the wrong garment to the furore of family and relatives.

The title of the film refers to a Tamil proverb, 'Yaanai irunthaalum aayiram pon, iranthaalum aayiram pon' (யானை இருந்தாலும் ஆயிரம் பொன், இறந்தாலும் ஆயிரம் பொன்), which tells the insignificance of the human body. A corpse is worthless once life departs, perhaps only useful as a cadaver in a medical school. An elephant is worth a thousand gold coins, dead or alive. A living elephant is helpful for hard labour and a dead one for its tusk and hide.

Worth the while. 9/10.

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