Vidheyan
India,
1993, 112 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
-
Adoor Gopalakrishnan
- prod
-
K. Ravindranathan Nair
- scr
-
Adoor Gopalakrishnan
- cam
-
Ravi Varma
- editor
-
M. Mani
- cast
-
Mammooty, Gopa Kumar, Tanvi Azmi, Sabita Anand
- source
-
General Pictures
OTHER
Thommi, a tenant farmer from Kerala, and his wife, Omana, come to neighboring Karnataka, a village in southern India, in search of a livelihood. Thommi is timid, the kind of person who accepts authority without question. This disposition helps him find a plot of land but at the same time embroils him in the acts of mindless cruelty of his new master, the village chief Patelar, and a life filled with degradation and shame. However, the film seems to ask, who really is the servile one, Thommi or Patelar? The Servile is director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s (Monologue, 1987; The Walls, 1989) elaborate exploration of the conditions of control. Patelar’s own obsession with his vanishing power and glory is as irrational and debilitating as Thommi’s helpless dependence on him. Says Adoor Gopalakrishnan about his film: "I have used the plot of the story to explore the subterranean landscape of the human mind. Here, terror—the oppressive form of power—joins hands with servility in a pathological alliance of interdependence. Each of them, oppressor and oppressed, is the source of sustenance of the other."
—Shampa Banerjee
FACTOID #208
Before the showing of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at the 40th SFIFF, Bay Area editor Walter Murch (who selected the film to screen in the Indelible Images series), passed out fortune cookies to the crowd with Bresson’s musings on making films.
