Hard time
'Visaranai' examines the brutal prison system but stays clear of summary judgments

Tamil filmmaker Vetri Maaran’s new film Visaranai (Interrogation) is primarily about contrasts, or more precisely, about stringing connections between seemingly disparate elements.
The film is a fictionalized account of real-life events based on the novel Lock Up, a personal account by auto rickshaw driver M. Chandrakumar. Four innocent men from Tamil Nadu who have migrated to Andhra Pradesh in search of work are arrested by the police. The charge: breaking into the bungalow of an influential and powerful family and robbing a million rupees. There is political pressure on the cops to solve the case as quickly as possible.
The four principal characters of the movie are the ideal scapegoats for the cops who have colluded to implicate these individuals—selected at random and nearly anonymous to society—in order to shut the case as quickly as possible. They are runaways and don’t have families who can vouch for them and bail them out. They are in the Andhra town of Guntur, a place that is highly hostile towards Tamil-speaking people. They don’t even have an official address; they sleep at a public garden, which makes it easy for anyone to be suspicious of them. And when the owner of the provisions store where the protagonist Pandi works tries to help them, the police threaten to arrest him if his employee doesn’t confess.
The cops torture the men to extract a confession. It’s here that Vetri Maaran’s astute understanding of the medium is evident. These portions are mostly shot in cramped spaces full of darkness with only a few stray beams of light making their way into the frame. The lock up at the police station assumes the near-mythic quality of an isolated dungeon, and the station itself feels murky due to the low-key yellowish hue of these images. For most part of the first half, the action is confined almost entirely to the police station, where blank walls are the only things we see in the background, accentuating the adamancy of the cop, Vishweshwar Rao, who is hell-bent on getting a confession.
There is no exploitative gaze to the way the torture is portrayed. There’s a stunning grace note where, just when a cop begins thrashing one of the men, the camera solemnly glides up away from the action to capture an exhaust fan spinning dully, momentarily making us aware of the wind outside amidst the suffocating dreariness of the station. Much like the images, with swathes of darkness interrupted by discrete beams of light, the soundscape is all void silences punctuated by loud sounds; screams of the detainees and the thudding sounds of lashes hitting bodies as Rao, determinedly but dispassionately, goes about his routine.
What threatens to be a movie entirely about the confinement takes an about turn around the interval when, quite surprisingly, the four men find relief. It comes in the form of Muthuvel, a cop from Tamil Nadu who runs into the hearing of their case in court and vouches for Pandi, who he recognizes as the shopkeeper from whom he had once bought cigarettes. Muthuvel takes centrestage in the second half of the film, with Pandi pushed back to the role of a passive spectator; and it’s at this point that the film delivers its coup of slyly shifting the audience’s perspective with regards to its characters. Rao is the bad guy, and Muthuvel’s act of helping the four men instantly casts him as a hero of sorts in the eyes of the audience. Or so the film makes us believe, only to subvert these notions later.
The second half plays out like an aesthetic and narrative mirror image of the first. Here, Muthuvel does roughly the same thing as the bad cop from the first half. Pandi and two of his friends from the lock up (the fourth man gets off at an earlier point) are asked to clean up the police station and thus become allies of the policemen.
The contrast doesn’t end at that. Here, too, a large part of the action takes place within the enclosed space of the police station, but while most of the events of the first half are set during daytime, the second half takes place entirely during night. Where sparse sunlight within a confined space gave the frames of the first half their yellowish gloom, here we have images that are sharply bright, almost as if the fluorescent lamps at the police station are of too high a wattage for the rooms. The soundscape follows the same contrasting pattern too.There isn’t a quiet moment to be found: there’s the relentless buzzing of walkie-talkies, which is amped up to such a degree that it threatens to drown out the dialogue, adding to the unnerving tension.
All this isn’t mere style. This is a smartly structured film, constantly refusing to give us a reason to arrive at a verdict. As a counterpoint, consider last year’s much-lauded Talvar. The cop played by Gajraj Rao is little else but an idiot, a character replete with annoying tics such as paan-chewing (which muddles up the clarity of his speech), having a funny ringtone and a case of piles. Or the director of the investigation bureau who takes over the case (or rather, reopens the almost-solved case) after the retirement of Prakash Belawadi’s character, who looks sophisticated and flashes gentle, scornful smirks.
These are hardly characters and more hollow archetypes that the film can conveniently label ‘bad guys’ owing to their external appearances. One-note characters or one-sidedness of perspective is fine in a certain type of movie (and as far as the real case is concerned, I personally find myself siding with the parents too.) But Talvar isn’t merely a film that makes no secret of which side it is on; it’s an expedient film that poses as a dialectic account of reality, using the Rashomon structure to examine all sides of the argument but denying one of the sides equal weightage and using stereotypes to align our sympathies with the other party; all the while throwing at us one pre-processed judgment after another (note the choice of the cop’s ringtone, and the part it plays in our perception of him as a buffoon.) It’s an attempt at providing quick-fix answers to incredibly complex questions so we can shake our heads at how pathetic the “system" is and return to our routines.
Visaranai may portray police brutality and corruption, but it isn’t an exposé. And there’s no judgment passed about the characters. Here, the protagonists—both Pandi and Muthuvel—traverse the moral spectrum and thus lend the film both its moral ambiguity and its empathy. When a character admits in a smart-aleck dialogue with Muthuvel that he is unmarried and has three girlfriends, he isn’t branded as a “certain type of person" because of this, neither by the character nor by the film. There’s no “system" to squarely slap the blame on, it’s all people and circumstances.
By not looking for answers but exploring questions in all their real-life messiness, Visaranai achieves a far more profound core of pathos. Note Rao’s somber disposition as he tries to wheedle out a confession from his hostages. The film’s greatness lies in the fact that it alludes to the possibility that he may well have been suffering too.
Visaranai is playing in theatres.
-
FIRST PUBLISHED17.02.2016 | 04:13 PM IST
-
TOPICSVisaranai | Vetri Maaran | Talvar | Lock Up | Interrogation | Police Brutality | Fim | Entertainment | mint-india-wire
- For all the latest Fashion News, Lifestyle News, Food News, Smart Living, Health Tips, and Relationships, only on Mint Lounge.