PS Vinothraj, whose last film Pebbles was selected as the Indian entry for the 94th Oscars, premiered The Adamant Girl at the Berlin Film Festival 2024. Like Pebbles, it makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals.
P.S. Vinothraj burst onto the indie cinema scene when his directorial debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) won the Tiger Award, the top prize at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2021. Later that year, it was India's entry to the Academy Awards. In February 2024, his second feature Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and all five screenings across the city were sold out.
When I meet Vinothraj in person, he is all smiles after a wonderfully engaged post-screening discussion with the audience at Arsenal, one of Berlin’s many thriving arthouse cinemas. At his hotel in Mitte two days later, with his co-producer Kalai Arasu as our interpreter, it becomes clear that the smiles are part of his persona.
Vinothraj wears his experience lightly, but the 35-year-old’s journey into filmmaking has taken unimaginable grit and clarity. Compelled to drop out of school in Class IV, he worked as a child labourer in a Madurai flower market and a Tiruppur singlet factory before landing a job at a Chennai DVD shop, where he started watching three world cinema DVDs a day. The aesthetic of Vinothraj’s films—long takes, minimal background music, no songs, zero melodrama—may have been shaped by this immersion.
He beams when I mention the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose 1998 Palm D’or winner Eternity and a Day he has called his favourite film. His favourite filmmaker, he says, is Tony Gatlif, French director of many films on the Roma community. A picture of Gatlif, a 70-something man with grey hair and a warm smile, is Vinothraj’s phone wallpaper. Gatlif’s films and Eternity and a Day are “travelling films”, which Vinothraj says “will always be my inspiration”. But while admiring these European masters, his cinematic material is drawn from his immediate surroundings, both physical and socio-political. Formally, too, he makes astonishing use of Tamil Nadu’s unique light, sounds, landscape and even animals: a stray puppy, a sacrificial rooster, a mute but recalcitrant bull.
Pebbles featured an angry alcoholic called Ganapathy (stunningly played by Karuththadaiyan) who drags his son Velu (Chellapandi) out of school, so that they can go fetch his wife from her natal village 13 km away. Vinothraj mapped their journey, much of it on foot, onto a barren landscape of searing white heat that echoed Ganapathy’s relentless rage. Nothing really ‘happens’ during the 75-minute film (too short for an interval, which prevented a theatrical release in Tamil Nadu); it is about the mundaneness of this violence. But you cannot but be gripped by the father-son dynamic, with the child’s reaction to his father swinging between fear and subversion, and often settling for a watchful silence.
Silence is also the only weapon left to Meena in The Adamant Girl—if one can call it a weapon. Malayalam actor Anna Ben brings to the titular character a sense of mental fatigue combined with the last dregs of physical resistance. Meena is often in frame, in a moving vehicle. But she stays unmoving, even in her expression—except in one shot where she walks free, in her mind’s eye. And she speaks only one sentence in 100 minutes. We learn early in the film that she is ‘promised’ in marriage to Pandi (played with scarily believable aggression by popular Tamil actor Soori) but is in love with a boy she met in college.
Having failed to talk her out of it, both families decide to take Meena to a shrine where the ghost of her lover will be exorcised out of her. Her silence, Vinothraj told me, is because “the film starts after she has tried everything else”; one imagines the arguing and yelling and weeping that went before. Thinking about it later, I wonder if having a mostly silent protagonist also aids in Vinothraj’s quest, as he put it to me, to make films “that keep you visually engaged, that keep your attention despite whatever language barrier may exist.”
In other words, pure cinema.
Kottukkaali certainly is. It begins with a woman bathing, fully-clothed, at a public tap. Before seeing her face, we have felt her tears. Walking back home in the pre-dawn light, she passes by a covered bike and a buffalo, both somehow evoking the must-always-be-clothed bodies of women. Vinothraj takes us quietly by the hand into this cloaked world of women’s sadness, from Meena’s crying mother to Meena, whose tears have run dry. Parallel to it, often its cause, is the world of men’s anger, represented here by Pandi, his throat coated with a white lime paste because he is so hoarse from shouting.
Many have read the film as feminist, and it is. But Vinothraj’s clarity about everything that’s wrong with this universe does not preclude a profound understanding of everyone in it. “The film is about the internal war between Pandi and Meena. Neither of them is bad,” he told me, going on to explain how even minor characters fit into his cinematic vision. “The small boy in the rickshaw is like Pandi in childhood, a good boy. The little girl who drags the bull away is how Meena would have been in her childhood. Meenakshi was the ancient queen of Madurai. Pandi, Pandian, is also a historical king. So in my backstory, right from childhood, they’ve been ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’. Pandi would have felt responsible for Meena.”
Fictional backstories aside, his scripts often draw on things that have happened to people he knows. For Kottukkaali, his sisters contributed a lot of what became the women’s dialogue. “Everyone is very supportive (of my process). In fact, they joke: ‘Don’t get into any other trouble, or he’ll make another film!’”
His films, too, show a close-knit community where people look out for each other. But they also reveal a deeply patriarchal society: its rituals, its alcoholism, the lack of freedom for women, verbal and physical violence by men. Does he ever worry about the critical gaze he turns on a society he knows so intimately, exposing it to an international audience? “There are positive things in each culture, but also a few (negative) things that need to be addressed. As a responsible artist, it is my job to send a message across, so that these things will stop,” says Vinothraj. “There are no heroes and villains, only the social situation that is creating the conflict.”
First published in Moneycontrol, 10 Mar 2024.
