When the trailer for Jallikattu came out in September of 2019, it threw me off for one reason: a character was forcing himself onto a woman against a wall.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know why it was important to be included in the trailer. And I wasn’t eager to find out either.
Fast-forward to 2020. Jallikattu is India's official Oscar entry to the Best International Feature Film category. So I sat myself down to see what it was all about. And I braced myself to turn away when the scene of harassment came on.
The film starts with a montage. The villagers are asleep and waking up, and asleep and waking up. And after one long shot of a mountainous landscape with a trail of lights moving in the distance, the montage continues with the village men going on about their day, which primarily includes butchering beef, buying it, and thinking of ways to cook it up.
In that long montage with quick cuts accompanied by the BGM of a ticking clock and a low, vibrating percussion instrument, the film introduces us to all the men and what their days look like. A man hits his wife over breakfast, another man creeps after a woman despite her resistance, another man drinks alcohol instead of his morning tea, and so it goes.
The montage ends when a buffalo at the edge of a butcher’s knife escapes. And the chase by the village men to tame the escaped beast ensues.
Every scene and every shot in the film was flooded with men. Men walking around almost naked with no fear of rape, drinking and smoking everywhere with no policing, reigning over lands like it's their own living room, and ordering the other gender to do things their way. Theirs was a different world; one which I as a woman could never fathom.
With the men so miserably flawed, I had no character to root for in the beginning of the film. I wasn’t rooting for the men to catch the buffalo. I wasn’t rooting for the buffalo to escape either.
So when there was no one to root for, I sat through it for the fast pace, the nippy editing, the vibrant cinematography, the new events happening at every turn, the energetic performances and the sharp dialogues. Not to forget, the raw, primal background score by Prashant Pillai that elevated the eeriness of every crucial moment and kept me on the edge.
Then came a point in the middle of the film. The buffalo is trapped in a deep, empty well. An entire army of savage men carrying torches and sticks crowd around the well, looking down on the beast they’ve been trying to hunt down for so long, and start flashing their torches in its eyes and throwing sticks at its body.
The camera, which was so long looking down from the men's point of view shifts directly to the buffalo's. We are at the bottom of the well. The buffalo with its innocent, beady eyes is looking up at the hunters waiting to rip its flesh apart. The shot looks like a malicious UFO ready to suck up an innocent Earthling for alien experiments.
And that’s when I knew who I was rooting for. I couldn’t believe it. I was rooting for the damn buffalo. Because in its place I saw the women who were facing abuse in the hands of these men. In its place, I saw the lands and nature and its animals, which man has so brutally ravaged in every way by trampling over it, by digging through it, by cutting it and abusing it and consuming it until greed took over everything.
Through the buffalo’s eyes, I saw the real beasts. These men who were bound by no laws, who knew no limits, overpowering this alone and helpless animal.
There is a dialogue in the film that summarises the crux of Jallikattu. An old man sitting in front of a bonfire narrates the story of his father coming to these once forested lands, and clearing them for plantation.
He says, "Even now, with us here, this place belongs to the animals. Look there at those men. They may move around on two legs. But they are beasts.”
"Even now, with us here, this place belongs to the animals. Look there at those men. They may move around on two legs. But they are beasts.”
This is it. This is the crux of Jallikattu. It pushes the exploration of man's greed and man’s freedom to its limit. And beyond that limit is an animal like no other. A beast of another world, fighting its way to claim things for power and pride.
Now, you might’ve noticed that throughout this article, I’ve used the word men, and not humans. Because it was a story about men. For there cannot be women in this place. A place with a hideous amount of freedom.
But Pellissery has said in his interviews that he wasn’t trying to make Jallikattu a commentary on the male gender.
When asked if the critique of men in his film Jallikattu was intentional, he said, “In a way, yes. For me the whole film has just two characters – the buffalo and the crowd. And the crowd can be made up of anyone. I just see it as grey. I’m not trying to make it more about the behaviour of one gender.”
When asked if the critique of men in his film Jallikattu was intentional, he said, “In a way, yes. For me the whole film has just two characters – the buffalo and the crowd. And the crowd can be made up of anyone. I just see it as grey. I’m not trying to make it more about the behaviour of one gender.”
“The crowd can be made up of anyone,” he says. But can it?
Let’s take that scene from the trailer that threw me off two years ago: the scene where a man is forcing himself onto a woman.
This scene comes after the mid-point where the buffalo is trapped in the well and the story establishes that the real beasts are the men.
Antony, a man who works in a small beef butchery, who was careless while killing the buffalo, leading to its escape, makes claim for trapping the buffalo in the well. This man has been making unwelcomed advances towards his employer-and-landlord’s sister Sophie throughout the film.
Once, when Sophie was romantically involved with a man named Kuttachan, who was a superior to Antony in the butchery, Antony turned jealous. He tricked Kuttachan into committing a small crime and got him kicked out of the village.
Now, Kuttachan was called back to the village for taming the buffalo. This time, to prove his real dominance, Antony goes to make claims over Sophie as well. While all the men camp near the well, trying to find ways to get the buffalo out, Antony goes to Sophie’s house.
Under the disguise of wanting to take a rope, he checks if she's really alone in the house. And when he's sure, he pushes her against the wall and kisses her as she hits him and asks him to leave her alone.
He then says, “Get in and bolt the door. I’ve trapped the beast.” And he begins to leave.
But Sophie stops him. “Antony!” she yells.
Just when I thought she was going to question him or reprimand him, she simply asks him to bring some ribs so she could cook a dish with it. She says it as casually as a wife saying it to her husband.
Then the camera stays on her as she watches him leave. Her look was indecipherable. I remember thinking to myself, "Don't make this woman smile. Don't make this into something romantic. Don't. Don't. Don't."
She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t look angry. She just breathes heavily, and looks… proud? But proud of what? Having been conquered by the dominant man? The way a female animal would feel after a male animal asserts his dominance in a fight? Has she simply accepted her fate that she was now his? Why didn’t she question anything?
The fact remains that it is tough to imagine a world like this where the roles are reversed, where women enjoy this extreme freedom. The crowd, indeed, cannot be made of anyone.
If this film wasn’t a commentary on gender, then why include this scene in the trailer? Just to attract viewers?
Or maybe it expands on the idea of man and animal. The idea that they’re not very different. That we are not very different.
Now I say "we" instead of "men", but how much have women really contributed to this destruction? Women haven’t largely been capitalists, or dictators, but just the oppressed consumers buying what products the capitalists have claimed to be “useful” and being in wars dictators have claimed to be “important.” If we take this point, so were a lot of men mere consumers and participants.
But the fact remains that it is tough to imagine a world like this where the roles are reversed, where women enjoy this extreme freedom. The crowd, indeed, cannot be made of anyone.
So, if this film wasn’t a commentary on gender, then what was it a commentary on?
Until the mid-point, I didn’t consider these men to be beasts. I just sat back and enjoyed the ride, the way I do with every other south Indian film.
Did we really need a buffalo to prove to us that these men were beasts? Weren't these men beasts all along in the way they treated women?
I accepted these men for the abusive, raging, perverted drunks they were, the way I do with every other film where the hero does the exact same thing of stalking the heroine and fighting another man (who stalks the heroine), and asserting his dominance to claim the girl.
Let’s say this film did not have that shift in the middle where my perception of the beast had changed from the buffalo to the men. Let’s say it was still just a necessary pursuit of man to tame a beast terrorizing the neighbourhood. Then would I have just accepted these men as saviours?
If their toxic behavior wasn’t pushed beyond the limit where these men started acting like demons, would India have accepted them as just regular, flawed men in need of character development, the way we do with every other hero in every other film?
If it wasn't for that one scene inside the well, would Jallikattu have made the Oscars entry?
And more importantly, did we really need a buffalo in a well to prove to us that these men were beasts? Weren't these men beasts all along in the way they treated women?
Intentionally or unintentionally, the film has turned out to be a commentary on us all as audience. On how tolerant we are towards abusive men. On how accepting we are of unacceptable behaviours as mere character flaws. And on how far we need to go before reaching that oh-so-debated-and-denied state of equality.
Something else I noticed in the film was the warning label which read, "Violence against women are punishable under law." It is shown in two scenes: One where the husband hits the wife over breakfast, the other was the forcing against the wall scene.
But there's another scene where a police officer is throwing things around his wife. They don't hit her, but it is a tactic abusers use to scare their victims without actually hurting them. Why wasn't the label issued here as well?
I've never seen this label anywhere before I watched this film. To be honest, I found it funny. One, because a warning label in a film has to tell men that abusing women is wrong. The other reason was that if this label were to be used for Indian films of all languages, then at least 80% of the things a hero does, says, and sings to the heroine would come with this label. Perhaps, that is why, they don't use it in other languages.
Jallikattu may not be a commentary on the male gender, but it is a commentary on how much freedom we give to that gender to do anything they want, and how much we ask the female gender to simply look the other way.
Intentionally or unintentionally, the film has turned out to be a commentary on us all as audience. On how tolerant we are towards abusive men. On how accepting we are of unacceptable behaviours as mere character flaws. And on how far we need to go before reaching that oh-so-debated-and-denied state of equality.
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