Yaaaay, the first post on a woman director in honor of women directors week! I really love Anjali Menon and I have lots and lots of thoughts, so hopefully this will be a good start. And I really hope it will achieve my main goal, which is to alert new viewers to the awesomeness of these talented woman.
Anjali Menon grew up in Dubai and went to film school in London, did well enough to get her graduation short film into film festivals. And then she chose to come home to Kerala to start her career. The other people involved in that same short went on to produce an Oscar winning documentary (Asif Kapadia, Amy) and feature in a hit American TV show (Archie Punjabi, The Good Wife). That is the career Anjali Menon could have had, but she chose something different. Instead of winning Academy Awards and making millions working for American TV, Anjali Menon is writing and directing her own stories following her own vision in Malayalam cinema.
The first theme that I find in Menon’s work is that of the wanderer looking for home. In her first full length movie, Manjadikuru, that theme is in the first line of dialogue, a voice over saying that whenever he is asked where his home is, he says it is a little village in Kerala. The movie is the story of a little boy from Dubai who spent two long weeks in that village and found home there, the place that would always be his home. In Ustad Hotel, the film she wrote but did not direct, we see another hero from Dubai, a grown man who planned never to visit the Kerala he left as a baby and, once he did, discovered he could not leave. In Bangalore Days, the central question of the film is what makes a home, as the three central characters lose the magical village of their childhood but find a new shared home in Bangalore. And in Koode, our hero who has been homeless for so long, the untethered guest worker of Dubai, finally finds his home again.
Maybe you have to actually live away and choose to return in order to understand the value of home? So many Indian films are about those who left, the ones with the wonderful jobs and perfect houses, the dream lives. But Anjali Menon makes films about those who left, and then came back. The ones who found dreams and money and success, but also emptiness. The ones who dream of a place to call home because they have almost forgotten the feeling of having one.
And those who are dreaming are mostly men. That’s the other theme of Menon’s work, hurting men. It takes a woman sometimes to see a man’s pain. Not weakness, but pain. Male directors, it feels like they are afraid to acknowledge that, to break the code of masculinity and reveal that their hero feels fear, sorrow, regret, and (most terrifying) doubt. But women know the truth, know that men cry and fear and can be hurt, just like women can, just like any human can.
Men aren’t supposed to need a “home”. Anjali Menon’s heroes, over and over again, deny this need. Or try to limit it to a simple definition which, once it is gone, also erases their need. In Manjadikuru, the hero’s uncles voluntarily walk away from the family home because of pride, of anger. While the boy children cry and acknowledge the pain of this decision. In Ustad Hotel, our hero denies to himself that he is rushing into a new life and future because he misses the sense of home he used to have from his sisters. In Bangalore Days, one hero clings to the imagined home of the village that is going away, while the other claims to not have or need a home at the same time that he clings to the cousins that are “home” for him. In Koode, our hero is so wounded by his years of exile that his head and heart are delayed, the film is one long home coming.
Those themes are somewhat unique in her work, but what is really unique is how they are expanded. Anjali Menon’s style is made for Malayalam cinema, and Malayalam cinema is made for her. Long slow stories of lives that mix the bitter with the sweet, quiet heroism in quiet moments, and a general sense of society as a connected net where the actions of one person effect the lives of everyone around them for good or bad. It’s not just about the language people are speaking, or the villages where the films are set, it’s something inside, a way of looking at the world and presenting it on film.
The opening of Koode is two long silent shots. First a shot from above of black sludge in a white tank in which we slowly see a small figure moving. The camera holds on this image for a long time, letting the audience slowly accommodate themselves to the oddity and get oriented, realize it is a man cleaning sludge in an oil tank. It is a world of black and white, dirt and the men who are stained by it. And then we see Kerala, a long slow winding path up a mountain. Again, the image is abstract, we have to struggle to understand it. We see a world of green growing things, lush air filled with water and mist, everything that is gray and soft and wet and fertile. In any other film industry in India, she would have been forced to include dialogue, a song, or at the very least speed things up a bit. In any film industry in the west, they would have demanded context, clarity, who is this man and what is this place? But in Kerala, she could simply tell the story and let it be. She is speaking to her own people in her own language.
The reason I find Anjali Menon so exciting is because her work is a perfect marriage of style and story. Indian film has a long tradition of writer/directors because it tells the stories it tells through the visuals as much as the script. But Anjali Menon is more than that. Koode is an adaptation of someone else’s story, a Marathi film. But in her hands, purely through the way she alters the visuals, it becomes something more. The images in her films do not add to the story, they are the story. And then I watch Ustad Hotel, her story through someone else’s eyes, and the narrative she created drives the visuals, demands something from the director that would not otherwise be there.
There are a lot of directors I respect in India. But there are very few that I think of as quietly unlike anyone else. Anjali Menon is one of those. Her films are not like anyone else’s films. And with each one, they become less and less like anyone else’s. She is forging a path out there, all by herself, into an entirely new direction.
dontcallitbollywood 
I really have to watch some of her other movies besides Koode. So many images from Koode have stayed with me, more than they usually do. I’m kind of a visual ignoramus, which is one reason I enjoy reading your blog, to pick up on the colors, compositions, lighting, etc that I otherwise would miss. But she makes an impression. Here are a few videos about Koode which I have enjoyed watching and re-watching. Not only because of my current Prithvi obsession.
An interview with Prithviraj and Nazriya which I think you may have posted on one of your Koode posts:
And a short “behind the scenes” video. Ranjith’s performance is amazing–what expressions and physicality this guy has.
And one more, focusing on women behind the scenes in Koode:
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Bangalore Days is wonderful, and Nazriya gets to take center stage in that. Plus Parvathy. But Ustad Hotel is another film that considers masculinity in a way similar to Koode. So I don’t know which one I would recommend first!!!!
On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 9:21 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Ustad Hotel is not good choice right after Koode, because the story is not as good, and most importantly Dulquer is not Prithvi (especially because it was his second film)
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Then Bangalore Days it is! Still Dulquer, but also Nivin, and Fahad.
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Prithviraj broke my heart in Koode, especially the way he cringed at the family dog.Such a difference from his usual swagger.Anjali Menon is excellent at fleshing out the family dynamics with just a few dialogues.His resentment, his parents inability to connect with him,their selfishness -everything is told naturally over the course of the film.Rather than shown in just one go.One of the failure of the Tamil version of Bangalore days was when they cast Nivin’s character arc as a comic side plot.Unlike the original where Anjali took care to give equal importance to all the four characters.Though I’m not happy with the characterization of all the parents even with Anjali’s version. Every one of them is funny or gossipy or incompetent.
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Oh dear, Bangalore Days with Nivin as comic would lose so much. We needed him as the sort of “average” guy trying to do his best to balance the other two. And his character’s journey from fussy stodgy clinging to a fantasy of the old days, to embracing the new, that’s the message of the film.
On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 12:54 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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You all are making me wish I could watch Koode. Just finished Bangalore Days and it was so sweet, I really liked it. This is the sexy Dulquer I remember from OK Kanmani, and Nivin’s smile is gorgeous. And Nazriya and Parvathy, all around wonderful. I love the story, the cousin bond feels so real, it’s like a powerful center of gravity that allows everything else to spool out but remain connected. The characters each travel far over the course of the film but you always know where they’re coming from because of that bond at the center.
Thinking about romance through a woman writer/director’s eye: each of the romantic relationships has a surprise inside of it that the main characters have to discover. What makes the love work or not work is not the easy part that follows the conventional patterns (the arranged marriage, the love at first sight, the flirting over the phone), but how the characters respond to the unexpected parts, whether they’re willing to stick it out through the hard and uncomfortable circumstances that life presents them with. Then, it’s not the sticking it out itself that’s the virtue – not endurance for its own sake – but how they’re able to grow and adapt and build something beautiful out of the leftover remnants of their expectations.
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Koode: https://einthusan.ca/movie/watch/3gld/?lang=malayalam
Or, you can get a Hotstar subscription like I have been nagging everyone about 🙂
Really interesting point about romance! Each of the romances takes a trope and turns it around and makes it real. The arranged marriage that is supposed to somehow magically work out, the dream girl and the love at first sight, and the quest for the mystery woman. But arranged marriages are hard work an sometimes fail, the dream girl tends to be more about you putting your own fantasies on her than on something real, and the mystery woman may not be what you expect. And then it keeps turning, the arranged marriage almost fails and then works out, the dream girl had her own agenda and maybe saw you as a “dream”, and the mystery woman is more than just the first shock of what she really is. Maybe that’s what the cousin bond does? Gives them strength to work through all these changes in their own way because they know they have something to rely on even if things don’t work out, even if it isn’t perfect.
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Posting this wonderful interview of Anjali Menon by Baradwaj Rangan where she says she hates the term women director,how she writes the male characters,about Banglore Days and also a quick summary of Malayalam movie history.
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She makes several good points about why Malayalam industry is the way it is-from drawing inspiration from an earlier generation of filmmakers to being an indie filmindustry driven by directors and writers rather than stars,this is the best anyone can explain in English about what drives the Malayalam films.
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Rewatched manjadikkuru. Such a moving film with lot of emotions which made me teary eyed at the end. The child artist who played maid’s role is such a talented. Wish to see her in more movies.
Bt koode didn’t connect to me like Anjali’s other works. Felt it was little bit preachy in many parts.
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Manjadikkuru is remarkable for a first film. Already so complex in characters with no easy answers, already such a unique voice.
On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 10:19 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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