Tell a thousand lies to make a wedding take place!

Ullozhukku (Undercurrent, Malayalam; 2024)

Written & Directed by: Christo Tomy

https://www.binged.com/streaming-premiere-dates/
ullozhukku-malayalam-movie-streaming-online-watch/

Urvashi was a regular in many Tamil movies in the 1980s. She used to appear in many of the blockbusters, including those acted and directed by the multitalented Bhagyaraj. She went on to win many regional and national accolades. Then her appearance declined as demand shifted toward younger faces. She became choosy about her roles as she took a breather with family life and childbearing. She shone in whatever roles she took. 

This movie is one such movie. It is a slow-moving but engaging one that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats, wondering how the problem will be resolved in the end. 

Marriage plays a vital role in the Indian psyche. From a line in the Manu Smriti, often exaggerated by detractors, which equates an unmarried woman to the stones by the river being washed away. Many critical editions dismiss it as an improper translation. Modern Hindu laws do not follow this doctrine verbatim. 

A peculiar thing about Hindu funeral rituals is that some steps are omitted when the deceased is unmarried. He or she is considered to have not led a complete life. Since the deceased is not one who surrendered to a brahmachari way of life, he is assumed to have not completed his householder duties.

In Tamil, there is a saying that goes like this. 'Tell a thousand lies to make a wedding take place' because the blessings of a successful union of marriage supersede everything else. Because of this, many marriages are arranged through marriage brokers through half-truth or the convenient erasure of negativities.

Anju is married off to Thomas Kutty. Anju's mother gets her married because of her entanglement with a Hindu man. Thomas Kutty is a sickly person who had a brain injury. He has epilepsy and needs frequent hospital admissions. His mother, Leelamma, seeks the help of a broker, with a full declaration of his medical condition, to find a bride. Somehow, the truth is suppressed and the wedding proceeds.

https://english.mathrubhumi.com/movies-music/news/
ullozhukku-teaser-out-d676af5e

Anju is shocked to find herself in a meaningless marriage. There is no intimacy. She essentially ends up being a nurse for her husband. In that situation, during one of her numerous hospital trips, she bumps into her ex-boyfriend. Romance is rekindled on the sly, thanks to the privacy of the mobile phone. Anju gets pregnant.

Meanwhile, Thomas Kutty succumbs to a fall. Anju's pregnancy comes to light. Leelamma is overjoyed, thinking it is her son's progeny which was germinating.

The village they live in is perpetually underwater, even after a short spell of rain. Thomas' funeral and burial are chronically delayed. In the interim, the story of the boyfriend and the love child comes to light. The rest of the story deals with how she deals with a likeable mother-in-law whom she had wronged, her own family, who is ashamed by her action and the father of the child, who appears more like a rolling stone that collects no moss and has his eyes keenly on Leelamma's property that she had willed to pass to Anju.

A nicely done film, minus all the wailing and melodrama associated with most Indian movies.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

To watch and forget?

Dude (Tamil, 2025)
Director: Keerthiswaran

https://watch.plex.tv/movie/dude-2025-1

This is a Gen Z movie through and through. A movie where traditional values once held in Indian films go down the drain. These values include filial piety, respect for the institution of marriage, a one-man-one-woman philosophy, and the traditional Indian belief that one is married to one's spouse not for one lifetime, but for seven. Sacred symbols are tossed out like playthings. Sex is no longer a society-sanctioned act, but a mere biological necessity. 

The movie starts with a bang. The hero, Kollywood's Gen-Z heartthrob, Pradeep Ranganthan, attends his girlfriend's wedding celebration. The girlfriend had jilted him and chose to marry an NRI to settle overseas. In the slapstick confusion of events, the hero ends up snatching the sacred thread tied around the bride's neck!

From then on, it is a comedy of errors and faux pas. Hero is heartbroken. His cousin wants to pair up, but he declines. Disappointed, she leaves town. The hero realises he loves his cousin and runs to propose.

He approaches his caste-obsessed uncle, who greenlights their wedding arrangements. Hold behold, the cousin had already fallen in love with someone else and was already pregnant. The story of the story is a whirlwind of half-truths and lies to cover the initial cover-up. The uncle @ father-in-law, is a murderer. He killed his own sister for falling in love out of caste.

Even though the whole exercise was in the name of comedy, everyone now shared the sentiment. They viewed the entire thing as mocking Indian culture and promoting a lifestyle not quite accepted by the generation before them. Changing partners is like changing diapers? Remove, clean, powder up, and discard the effluents into the bin, then move on.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

As you see it!

Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute, French; 2023)
Director: Justine Triet

We reassure ourselves by telling lies. We are so cock sure that truth will win. It would somehow emerge from the crack to balance the equilibrium of the Universe. One of the half-truths we convince ourselves is that there is a balance of two opposing but sometimes complementary forces; the good and bad, the truth and the lie, the masculine and feminine forces, chaos and order and so forth. The 'truth' wins every time, we con ourselves.

It is all a perspective of the now and the glaring presence of the evidence of the present. No caped sorcerer will ride the high horse of justice to right the wrong. 

That, in my opinion, is the essence of this story. A husband is found dead in his frosted front yard, presumably after a fall from his balcony three storeys up. He was discovered by his blind son, returning from a walk with his guide dog. The wife was alone in the house with blaring music playing on the speaker. Their relationship had seen better times.

The physical fall brings out the metaphorical fall out of love, the fall of status for the husband, and the possible fall into depression of the husband. 

Initial police investigations suggest it could be a suicide, but a recording of the couple's conversation throws a spanner into the works. The wife, an established author, is arrested as the possible suspect of the murderer of her husband. 

The court trials tease out the family dynamics. What starts as the couple falling in love, having a child, and juggling their careers turns murky. In an accident possibly caused by the husband's lackadaisical delay, the son is caught in an accident that causes him to lose his eyesight. The guilt-stricken writer-husband, compounded by the mother's veiled accusations, becomes a wreck. His writing juices dry up, and love falls off the cliff.

The wife is questioned as a possible perpetrator of the crime or maybe accidental death on a possible domestic tussle. Her previous blemishes are exposed. The animosity that arose as she prospered as a prolific writer at the expense of her husband's creative impotence is laid bare. 

The son takes the heaviest brunt of it all. His testimony at the stand may determine how the case turns out for the mother. He is unsure how to look at all of the events. Did his father kill himself? Did his mother kill his husband? These conundrums seem to put a lot of burden on the shoulders of a young early teenager. Everything is confusing. He is pressured to do the right thing, but what is right anymore? 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Till death do us part?

Over the past few years, a couple of my childhood friends had the misfortune of having lost their spouses to cancer. One of them fought the deadly disease tooth and nail, but unfortunately, after three long years, the disease got the better of her. He lost the good fight. My devastated friend went awol for an entire year, deciding that solitaire was the best remedy for a broken heart. The societal expectation for the grieved to open up his emotions and replay them like a broken record was not for him. 

One year after her demise, at 60, he introduced his new other half to the world. Conversations and felicitations on his plunge revealed that it was a necessary indulgence for him. Even though his children were married and he was a grandfather three times over, he felt the need for intimate touch and passion. He is a happy man. The memory of his old wife is very much alive, and he will cherish them till the end of time.

Another friend with a couple of late teenage, young adult daughters, lost his wife after a long tiring battle with ovarian malignancy. Still reeling from the loss, he was still not out of the woods yet when I spoke to him six months after her demise. He still felt her presence around the house, and his mind kept playing, reminiscing the good times, playing back obscure events in their wedded bliss to miss her more. 

I slowly introduced the idea of finding a replacement to fill the void; he asserted that he was pretty sure. At that juncture, he only wanted to spend the rest of his years living in dear memory of his duly departed. He feels complete without a need to build a new one. 

Out of curiosity, I enquired from another dear childhood buddy whose wife is hearty, healthy, and kicking. Heaven forbids, if his partner were to die, what would he do? Is remarriage on the plate? Without batting an eyelid, he said he would envisage himself taking a new partner. It is not as much for physical gratification but for social interaction and communication. He felt that was necessary for healthy mental health. 

Yet, when posed with a similar question, another pessimistic realist friend viewed his one stint in matrimony as enough to last his whole lifetime. Gone are the days when intimacy and husband-wife interaction played a pivotal role in his daily life. He had started enjoying the company of he and himself, exploring new frontiers to expand his knowledge and experience. He guesses that his wife is in the same boat, too. Over the years, embroiled in the hard knocks of life, they grew apart, from being co-dependent to interdependent to independent, sometimes contradictory just for the kick of it, able to stand alone to face the music. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A bold move?

A Summer Place (1959)
Director: Dalmer Daves

This must be a bold movie when it was made in the late 50s, talking about infidelity, teenage promiscuity, behaviour and sex. With all the restrictions on American movies' code of conduct, they pulled this out.

The movie starts with a summer vacation mansion that has seen better days. It is run by a husband-and-wife team (Bart and Sylvia). The husband is an obvious dipsomaniac, and the wife is apparently uncontended with life. They have a soon-to-go-to-high school son (Johnny, acted by teenage heartthrob Troy Donahue). Business is barely sustainable as the husband, who inherited it from his father, is more interested in keeping himself inebriated. 

In comes a millionaire with his wife (Ken and Helen) and teenage daughter (Molly, acted by Sandra Dee, typically typecasted as an ingénue, simple girl) to stay for the next three months. The juicy story behind it is that the businessman used to work as a lowly lifeguard there and had sought greener pastures when Sylvia rejected his love advances. 

Ken and Helen also have an unhappy marriage, with Helen being the uppity urbane female with class consciousness and a stickler for rules). Helen is the strict parent who controls Molly's every attire and behaviour, while Ken is the chill parent.

Ken rekindles his affair with Sylvia. Their nightly secret rendezvous came to Helen's knowledge. Johnny and Molly, with their raging teenage hormones, see Cupid shooting arrows. 

The story becomes twisted as Ken and Sylvia divorce their spouses, and the step-siblings discover their sexuality.

Even though the acting (except for Helen, played by Constance Ford), the dialogue and its delivery leave much to be desired, the music score by Max Steiner turned out to be evergreen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hold on to your seats!

Irugapatru (Tamil, இருகப்பற்று, Hold on Tight; 2023)

Written, Directed: Yuvaraj Dhayalan

I saw the bride's mother. She seems so happy seeing her firstborn all dolled up in her matrimonial regalia, walking up the aisle to exchange vows. With all her worry lines nicely masked beneath the layer of makeup, I could have forgotten all the trials and tribulations she went through throughout her marriage. Though hers was a love marriage, the reality of life soon set in after the honeymoon period was over. Her husband was apparently neither ready to cut ties with old girlfriends nor cut the proverbial umbilical cut from his mother's womb. Her tussle with her husband trying to squeeze love and money was an eternal challenge throughout her marriage. Like squeezing water from a stone, despite its challenges, she managed. Proof of her success is her three daughters and their successful careers. The husband is still very much in the picture, painting a perfect portrait of a happy family. 

Now that the daughter is getting married, I wonder if she will take all the challenges that life hurls upon her as her mother once did. Knowing that 50% of all marriages end in separation, my guess on the path that hers would take is like predicting the possible sex of a child at birth, 50-50.

Of course, the access to avenues for rights now is different than thirty years ago. The institution of marriage no longer garners the august status that it once did. Economic opportunities are no longer centred on one gender. The concept of an extended family caring for another member is slowly dying. Society's perception of what constitutes a happy family is changing. In the eyes of the younger generation, the image of a happy family is not merely one that includes a father, mother, children, and a pet or two. The Venn diagram representation of a family has so many circles, each representing family members (or a single member), and the intersections are so numerous. 

With the increased responsibilities the female members of society have to carry and the many hats they have to don these days, it is impossible to just push them to the backburners, stay invisible and be labelled 'just a housewife'. They are now more educated, more exposed and more empowered. They have a voice. Society is no longer patriarchal. The fairer sex demands equal standing. Even referring to them as the fairer one is not acceptable.

Glitches happen when a middle ground is not found to allow both parties to prosper and prove their birth's worth. 

This film goes through the marriages of three couples through the eyes of a psychologist/marriage counsellor. The irony is that one of the couples is the counsellor and her husband. 

In the first story, a chronically irritable husband is frustrated with everyone around him. He is working at a job he dislikes. He does it to pay his bills. He had been prodded to do this and that throughout his life, giving his desires a backseat. His homemaker wife, who had just delivered a couple of months previously, is fat. He cannot believe it is the same girl he was match-made to marry. And she seems too lazy to do something about it. He wants a divorce. 

In the second instance, a magazine writer gets increasingly irritated with his wife. He thinks she is dumb when, in reality, she is not. His constant berating draws her into her cocoon. He wants a baby. She wants to work where she finds appreciation. The couple cannot imagine the other as the same person; they were deeply in love before marriage. She wants out. 

The counsellor thinks she has everything under wraps and suggests ways to save her clients' marriages. She thinks her marriage is sailing smoothly. She was trying out a new app that told novel methods to grab the partner's heart. When her husband discovers he is a dancing monkey in her social experiment, he flips. Her previously understanding and dream husband starts giving her cold treatment. 

The message behind this film is that there is no single quick-fix way to make a marriage work. It takes a lot of hard work. Neither party should take the other for granted. The modern institution of marriage has two co-pilots equally responsible for taking the boat ashore, bringing its cargo safely and ensuring safe disembarkation of goods and passengers. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.