Visual, Narrative and Thematic analysis of ‘Jallikattu’

Lijo Jose Pellissery is definitely one among the forerunners

of new wave in Malayalam cinema with his raw and innovative approach in film making. We have had great

directors in the past that approached film making realistically. At the moment, it also identifies that Lijo Jose

Pellissery is setting up a new trend in Malayalam cinema. Lijo’s crowning as the torch-bearer of current

Malayalam cinema is unquestionable. Through different stages of transitions in Malayalam cinema

prominent directors collaborated with prominent literary figures who were closely associated with the

progressive literary tradition. The film 'Jallikattu' by Lijo Jose Pellissery is based on the short story 'Maoist'

by S Hareesh, that satirizes the chaos unleashed in a high-range village after two buffaloes bought for

slaughter runs amok. It’s a fairly luminous allegory of the state's deeply-entrenched Leftist and semi-feudal

social structures over which a wet dream of revolution continues to hover.

The stories and narratives of Lijo are fairly localised to the

deepest corners of Kerala. His success lies in the treatment he gives for his narratives. Lijo has a very

peculiar style of telling stories. His characters, in general, are very comical and home grown. That reflects a

lot in the narrative also, in the way the story progresses. The avant-garde film 'Jallikattu' just takes his style a

bit further.

Jallikattu is set in a remote South Kerala village where a

typical Sunday morning begins with a visit to the local butcher Varkey to procure meat. Varkey with a

metaphorical “Kaalan”( God of death) added to his name seems to enjoy the process of picking the right

beast, dragging a rope through its nose, chopping its head off in a single blow, slicing and segregating it into

spine and ribs. The tree branches at the local church are filled with hanging plastic bags of meat. Males high

on testosterone and womenwho gossip, fight, cook and love are depicted effortlessly in the movie. The

animals are all snorting and grunting in the backdrop. Chaos ensues on the night Varkey tries to kill a bull,

but the animal runs into the wilderness. The beast rushes wildly through fields, plantations and human

habitations, spurring the men of the community to give chase. The chase that lasts through the movie begins

there. It is during the chase that the true self of the people are unveiled and we discover the repressed ‘self’

chained inside each one of us.

“In 95 minutes, the movie gorgess its way into the brain and builds together a mini version of the world,

exposing its filth” (Cris). It is a tale of bruised beasts and egos which “pulsate with an infectious, unrelenting

energy that is exhausting and exhilarating, enervating yet invigorating” (Vetticad).

A young man Antony trying to exact revenge on his rival

Kuttachan over a woman they both lust after, the fake virtuousness of a Hindu man who shudders at the sight

of the raw meat but is quick to secretly remind his wife which meat recipe to make, a farmer with a saintly

disposition going ballistic and showering expletives when he realizes that the bull has plundered his

vegetation, an agitated policeman getting violent with his wife, the town's richest man Kuriachan finding

himself the object of humiliation when he makes a last-ditch effort to procure some meat for his daughter's

wedding, the men pouring in from neighboring villages to fuel more hatred and create more chaos, the

clueless communists who are furious when their flag is felled by the bull- all these conflicts continue to play

out in the background while the bull wrecks havoc. The whole village is trying to get it under control. As the

villagers chase the animal, their real nature gets revealed and that is exactly where the story is focused. The

difference between man and beast disappears gradually.

The ruckus created by the slaughter bull turns the entire

village into a bedlam. Conquering it then becomes a matter of masculine pride, stirring up the primal instinct

of man. Jallikettu is emblematic of the crass violence we are used to in the name of masculinity. It shines a

mirror at the face of the machismo we have internalized as a society. In a story that starts as man versus wild,

it doesn't take that long before man becomes the wild. The men display their basest instincts while trying to

control the beast.

They use this battle as an outlet to vent their simmering

internal struggles, and gradually it becomes hard to distinguish between the four-legged animal and the

primitive, wild bipeds hot on their heels. The men are charged: they shout, scream, growl, hiss and snarl like

predators on the prowl and spit abuses out at each other depicting man’s primal instincts. It only adds its own

layers to this indigenous tradition of man versus the wild. Finally, the viewer is perplexed as to who is who.

“What is evidently a wild goose chase soon becomes a man versus beast dynamic. The boundaries will begin

to get blurry; the man’s grunts and snorts uncannily matches the beast’s and in quick succession the man

turns into a predator and the beast no longer wants to fight him”(Menon).
 No character is individualized in this movie. It is the mob

mentality that unravels in Jellikettu. Social Psychology which focuses on how people think about, influence,

and relate to one another attributes human personality to specific background, environment, culture, and

community. In this regard, Luke Holm suggests theattribution theory, which explains someone’s behavior by

analyzing their stable, enduring personality traits and the situation at hand.

Jellikettu draws one to analyze man's ability to lose a

rational thought in such a rage-fuelled mob. The bull rips through farms, orchards, churches, shops, homes,

and humans. The villagers form a maniacal mob set on trapping and killing the monstrous mouthwatering

mass of meat.

"Throughout the hunt the crowd devolves into a very Lord

of the Flies filled mentality, making illogical and knee-jerk caveman crazed decisions as well as of course

ego-fueled infighting”(Peligrosa). Using psycho-analytic approach of Freud, E. D. Martin interpreted crowd

behaviour as the release for repressed drives. The ‘censor’ within the individual is set aside in the crowd and

the ‘instinct’, which are normally confined to the inner depths of the personality, come to surface. The crowd

thus provides a momentary release of otherwise repressed drives (qtd. in Mondal).

Jallikattu deliberately sets out to impress upon the viewers

how similar humans are to animals, despite years of civilization trying to distinguish between the two

categories. How it takes only a trigger for us to regress to who we really are. Like the hypnotized person, ‘he

is no longer conscious of his acts....At the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be

brought to a high degree of exaltation....He is no longer himself, but has become an automation who has

ceased to be guided by his will....In the crowd he is barbarian. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the

ferocity and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings” (qtd. in Mondal).

Group mind makes people feel, think and act in a manner

quite different from that in which each individual would feel, think and act where he in a state of isolation.

Its working is hypnotic and based on emotions, appeals, suggestions and slogans. Its acts are less rational

and more emotional. It is an irresponsible mind focusing its attention on an immediate object. In this movie,

the immediate object is the bull. “With the man vs animal conflict as its central theme, Jallikattu serves as a
powerful reminder of man’s insatiable lust for power and supremacy over everyone else. The film also

explores themes of envy, jealousy, machismo, and chaos and mob behavior” (Khan).

The village’s only resident capitalist seems to be the

butcher ‘Kaalan’ Varkey, who keeps the elites – the clergy and the commissar alike – in good humour with

meatier cuts, thick lumps of fat and shorter waiting time while they mill around his blood-splattered Sunday

shop. Jallikattu is the sort of film that gorges it's way into the brain and rips through pre-conceived notions

of what constitutes cinema. As alive as the beast being hunted on screen through most of its crisp one-and-a-

half hours running time, the film pulsates with an infectious, unrelenting energy. Lijo’s 90-minute narrative

cuts close to the bone like Dante’s descent to hell traversing all the nine circles – limbo, lust, gluttony, greed,

anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery – till we reach the frozen heart of hell, of our own making. It is

violent, but not a celebration of violence. Far from it.

Film critics analyzing violent film images that seek to

aesthetically please the viewer mainly fall into two categories. Critics who see depictions of violence in film

as superficial and exploitative argue that it leads audience members to become desensitized to brutality, thus

increasing their aggression. On the other hand, critics who view violence as a type of content, or as a theme,

claim it is cathartic and provides"acceptable outlets for anti-social impulses". Jallikattu falls into the second

category. It could be analysed as a cathartic movie that conveys nothing moral but indirectly calls for a

change, by reflecting how mad the society is.

Movies depicting violence are often prone to convey

something more than they wanted to and thus may easily appear a celebration of violence. For instance the

recent movie Kabir Singh appears to the audience as an extreme celebration of violence. Such movies seem

to naturalise or normalise violent activities. It conveys a negative impact, directly or indirectly. But Jallikattu

though it is full of violence never appears as a celebration of it. Instead through violence it recreates the

actual man on screen and gives us an opportunity for identifying ourselves.

Lijo Jose Pellissery’s film adaptation, scripted by S Hareesh

and R Jayakumar, retains the plot structure but with pared down mise-en-scene and characters. While the

story has two buffaloes – a bull and a cow – we see only one in the film. The frenzied flight of the beast

subverts the social order of the village, shattering its economy of cassava and cardamom, ‘annihilating’ class
enemies and even destroying a bank. A mob gathers and even the weakest of the men want to join in. In an

Interview Hareesh opined that the story is a satire over the mob driven state order.

Frame after frame, Lijo makes us internalize the hypotheses

that human aggression is a genetic trait, that we are a doomed race – Neanderthals with innate animal

instinct that no civilizational aspiration can erase. For acquiring a piece of meat, the men in the film dare to

attack each other and reach to the extreme of killing. It reminds the viewers that we are living in a dog eat

dog world. Notwithstanding, externalguidance and supervision, humans disagree to shed off his animosity

and brute forces within himself.

Akira Kurosawa portrayed a similar storyline depicting the

human psyche. His Rashomon presents a notorious outlaw bandit who is tricking the samurai to veer off the

mountain trail with the enticement of ancient swords. Once he got the samurai into the groove, he tied him to

a tree and then fetched the man’s wife. While she valiantly attempted to defend herself with the use of a

small dagger, the bandit ultimately succeeded in what he terms a seduction. Afterward, overcome with guilt

and shame, she begged the bandit to challenge her husband to a duel to death in order to avoid the presence

of two men who bore witness to her dishonour. The bandit claims gallantry by agreeing to this demand, thus

arguing that the samurai’s death was therefore not murder but an honourable defeat in battle. The woman

then ran away into the woods. At the conclusion of his tale, the court inquires about that expensive dagger

that was left behind. He explains that he simply forgot about it amidst all the confusion, and pleads to being

foolish in allowing such a valuable prize to escape his greedy grasp. Self serving attitude of the human

psyche was well pictured by Kurosawa. While Rashomon treats the greedy and self-serving vulgarity of

man, Jallikattu explores almost all his vulgarities. Jallikattu outcasts the devilishness in man that makes

himself a devil in his way to reach his need, in fact, greed. These movies emphatically uncovered that

humans can be animalistic than animals themselves.

Despite all the civilizational transformations, it is

impossible to get rid of the social spectrum of our ancestors at stone ages. The deep sensory and emotional

structure of humans haven't changed much since the stone age. It is a dark tale with intense thematic

representation projecting the dark side of humans through the narration of the story. The story of Jallikattu,

in fact is less of a story and more of a situation. It contains a few dialogues, but leaves a lot unsaid.
Kurosawa too employed such a style in his Rashomon. Less speech and more action. Like Kurosawa, Lijo

Jose Pellissery too relied, to a large extent on natural sources of light. Each scene of the movie reflects the

dedication of those behind it.

On hearing the story line one may feel the film as an

exaggeration of a trivial thing. But it is not about the bull that spread havoc. The whole village panic as the

buffalo destroys some crops on its way.As the villagers chase the animal, their real nature gets revealed at

times and that is exactly where the story is focused.

In the charged atmosphere, men do not merely speak,

they shout, scream, growl and almost spit words out at each other and at the women in their lives. When one

such brute attacks a woman, he buries his head in her body, hissing and snarling like a predator hungry for

meat. She resists vehemently, but her subsequent calm conversation with him about a mundane matter is a

chilling metaphor for the normalisation of sexual violence in our society and the manner in which women

condition themselves to gather their wits about them in the face of male bestiality because of the frequency

with which they are subjected to such savagery.

Jallikattu remains focused on the ferocious male of the

species, but not without reminding us in the briefest of scenes that women themselves may appear calmer

but are not above running a dagger through other women whose choices they resent or condemn. It is not

that much about the story, but about primal machismo that drives the testosterone -y male species and the

extent of havoc man is capable of.

Jallikattu, is first and foremost, a textbook example of how

to make an experimental movie that's also the most entertaining movie. Sound becomes one of the major

aspects that gives the film a horror feel. Pellissery's narrative plunges into action from the get-go, using the

rhythm of the human breath, the flaming red of the title, the activity at a crowded meat shop, random banter

and seemingly extraneous sub-plots to create an electric sense of anticipation before the animal runs riot.

The absurdity is everywhere, beginning with the elaborate

"fakeness" of Prashant Pillai’s magnificent score and Renganaath Ravee's ornate sound design. The ticking

of the clock is amplified to sound like the fall of a hammer on an anvil. The inhaling/exhaling of breath
sounds like steam coming off a pressure cooker. Human choruses sing in primitive words, as though from a

time before language was invented. The music sounds like a soundtrack for an avant-garde dance

performance and the film, too, feels like an avant-garde performance. Renganaath Ravee's sound design

intermittently draws drum beats from every available element in the ambient audioscape, ranging from the

laboured inhalations and exhalations of an old man, knives striking animal flesh, the buffalo's hooves and the

mob in its wake. Prashant Pillai's music cuts in at intervals to inject further adrenaline into the proceedings.

Girish Gangadharan’s cinematography and Deepu Joseph's propulsive and distancing editing gives an

extraordinary sound-and-light show.

A set piece around a well is literally one such sound-and-

light show. The buffalo that created havoc in the society is trapped down in the well. It becomes a part of the

total absurdity that instead of killing that creature they try to get it out of the well. Antony lowers himself on

ropes, and he looks like a dancer- performing in a three-dimensional stage that is lit by the flashlights of the

men on top, peering into the well. At another instance, the light from these torches looks like fireflies on a

hillside. Lijo and his collaborators have created set pieces out of the most unremarkable events, like the

single take scene of a man planning a feast for his daughter’s engagement. Something as simple as three

groups of men walking away in three different directions becomes an indelible moment, filmed from a

God's-eye point of view.

The metaphor is the least interesting and most obvious

aspect of Jallikattu. All men are just plain animals. Like the man who slaps his wife because she has made

puttu again. Like the men who fight like beasts over a woman. Like the men who pour in from neighbouring

villages to create more chaos, fuel more hatred. It appears that we humans are still hunter-gatherers, hunting

and gathering everything within reach, even women.

The characterisation are paper-thin, moreover Jallikattu

is not a film that can accommodate personal histories. While a typical malayalam new gen movie

characterises a well established hero and heroine and their roots, here what we witness is just plain living at

the moment. No flashback, no sentiments but plain lives. If these people were individualised, it would take

away from the horde mentality that's behind the film’s design, which culminates in a series of stunningly

expressionistic images.
 Jallikattu does not merely revolve around a buffalo but take

a heuristic turn in which Lijo Jose Pellissery championed so vehemently. It tried to unveil the latest complex

political structure implicitly and made the viewers ponder beyond what they saw. Indeed, buffalo stands as

the symbolic representation of victims all over the world. Buffalo runs and destroys various things to protect

its own life. Indubitably, the movie displays the conflict between beast vs beast rather than beast vs man.

Though some identify this movie as the exaggerated portrayal over a trifling matter, it signifies the

possibility of frenzied viciousness by the mob over trifling matters. It has thrown up diverse perspectives and

perceptions and brings forth a great deal of discussion. The highlight of the movie, pyramid scene is, in fact,

a wake-up call for the audience. The filmmaker infuses the thread of Plebian humanism through immersive

visualisation.

The climax scene is the one which seems to appear less

digestible to the viewers due to its exaggerated violence. People attack Antony in the form of eating. This

climax scene has been effectively foreshadowed through the dialogue of Kuttichan;"the tastiest form of meat

was none other than the human flesh". It creates a stun and fear in the audience. It peels different layers of

the human ego, his unquenchable thirst for domination, endless greed.

The plot of the movie unfolds in a matter of 24 hours.

Girish, the cinematographer hit a roadblock when it came to depicting the different time frames at which the

events take place. He applied his expertise by setting up four establishing shots-the crack of dawn, sunset

and the phases of the full moon. There is a belief that cinematography is a good marriage between the

cinematographer and light man. Given the nature of the film, Girish has maximised the use of natural lights.

Lijo Jose Pellissery shared in an interview that he wanted the visuals to be intriguing and eye-popping at the

same time, and that resulted in a few staccato images. In the movie, all we see are extreme close-ups of its

main characters this way, with clock-ticking sound effects in the background. The opening scene is swiftly

cut with images of people and their routine life. This is followed by an elaborate three-minute stretch,

showing the dawn of a new day. Moreover, the movie is deeply philosophical in its approach. It has a

meditative shot towards the end where we see an old man and the buffalo locking eyes with each other. Such

scenes present throughout the movie are powerful enough to convey more philosophical aspects than

dialogues could convey.

 As one of the latest outcomes of Malayalam new wave,

Jallikattu follows the characteristic features of a new generation movie in having a screenplay rooted to

reality and closer to life and in having ordinary men and women as its characters. Lijo has added something

more to the genre through his narrative structure and visual style employed in his movies.

The frames of Jallikattu and his movies in general have

a much defined colour palette which is not usually seen and practised habit in Malayalam cinema. They

totally add to the mood of the particular scene and make the movie much enjoyable. The majority of his

colours are contemporary colours and their shades. He also uses the combination of these with the primaries

in his frames which stand out quite well. When the need arrives to dull the whole tone of the scene down he

shifts to Analogous range of colours with a bit of contemporary colours in the frame for highlights. He also

uses them in a 'big world, small man' sense of rather minimalistic kind of frames. Jallikattu consists of a

number of such scenes.

We can see an extensive use of the 'wide angle' range

of lenses in 'Jallikattu' as well as in his other movies. Lijo Jose Pellissery uses a wide lens for his advantage

for how distorted and absurd his stories and characters are. He has continued his habit of using a God's-eye

point of view in Jallikattu too. He shows his characters surrounded by the larger world or the society they

live in. Jallikattu, more precisely, adds to the rawness he is known for. The characters are local, quirky and

satirical. At times the characters tend to be opposites of the general stereotypical view of what they are

supposed to behave like. Magical Realism being a major part of Lijo’s narratives, Jallikattu like most of his

films concludes with a very unusual circumstance that astonishes and shocks the audience. It is more rather

mere reflections of society he talks about.

All of these elements the characters, story, visual and

narrative styles, colour and technical effect as well as the absurdity and rawness add up to the uniqueness of

the movie Jallikattu and make a wholesome package of art and entertainment, not so far seen in the history

of Malayalam cinema.

As Lijo puts it forth in an interview:

"When a story is narrated in the right way, it appeals to everyone in the world. Even if the place, people,

attire, language and dialect are different, what matters is that it tells a human story. That's why we enjoy a

Korean or French film, and how others enjoy our films".

The more local the story, the more international it is.

The way to tell the story of a particular place in detail is to bring in the flavor of the local food, the humour,

the music, etc. His recent films especially 'Jallikattu' and 'Ee.Ma.Yau' worked out to be successful and

international because they were not sticking to one protagonist and one storyline; they instead went on to tell

the land's tale, the story of people in particular.