Vettapattikalum Oottakkarum (2022) IFFK Review: The feminist movement of the 1960s championed one of the most universally relevant slogans of all time – The personal is the political. This simple yet layered statement has, however, left many gaps for academic intervention and political discussion. One key academic question would be – If the personal is political and both are indeed mutually inseparable, does the political have the right to invade the personal? Rarish G Kurupp’s Vettapattikalum Oottakkarum (2022) ponders over this thought and presents a timely, reflective, and evocative film on misogyny, information overload, and the violation of freedom and privacy. The film feels like a cheeky collage of prime-time news channels, with their endless and often senseless debates and Facebook comment sections stitched together to run parallelly on 2x speed, which eventually snowballs into a broader satire about societal vices of Kerala today.
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When an undergraduate student, Sabitha, posts on Facebook about her desire to sell her virginity, the whole of Kerala goes into a spiral. Activists, politicians, students, friends, family, and journalists all weigh in to share their two cents on the reason behind her actions and debate the irrecuperable ‘damage to society’ her actions have resulted in. Set nearly a year and a half after the initiation of the Digital India program, social media usage is on full throttle, with a majority of Kerala’s youth thoroughly invested in the happening of the digital world in the absence of any stimulus from the real world as they predominantly remain unemployed.
The film is mostly presented through the digital world of social media and prime-time television. It is very postmodern in its form as it incorporates interviews, news channel reports, social media screenshots and posts, and real-world footage to further the central narrative surrounding the controversies and aftereffects of Sabitha’s Facebook posts. Similar to the diverse forms of clippings used to stitch together the film, various topics of political contention and societal vices too get thrown in from different angles, sometimes without any correlation to the controversy that the film centers around. The uproars and clamors on new channel debates from perspicacious organic and traditional intellectuals provide an, at times, engaging and otherwise exhaustive viewing experience. The film occasionally branches away from the repeatedly dull conversation surrounding Sabitha’s Facebook post and teases its viewers with stimulating discussion on aspects of unemployment, sexual frustration, money laundering, and the meaning of culture in modern Kerala but drudgingly brings the focus back to Sabitha as endless dogmatic debates continue between polemicists without any pragmatic outcome.
The film, overall, is paced very quickly as the abovementioned discussions are chained together and presented in quick cuts one after the other, with no time for audiences to organize their thoughts, leaving them in a state of analysis paralysis. This incessant stimulus may result in mental exhaustion and boredom in audiences as they are unable to keep up with the action. One can read this as an intentional move of Kurupp’s to translate the real word analysis paralysis, which has resulted from the information dump of multiple media outlets, to his audiences, thereby producing a parallel metanarrative by experimenting with the form. While the manner in which the different media cuts are stitched together signals an omnipotent narrative at work, it never tries to assume moral high ground. It presents all arguments, both sensible and stupid, informed and fake, conservative and progressive, in equal light.
While there is a freshness in how the fast-paced, quick-cut, info-dump technique plays out initially in the film, eventually, it starts feeling redundant due to repetition, and stimuli from the first half slow down once audiences formulate a gist of the absurd nature of the film. One may argue that this, too, could be an intentional decision by the director to now translate to audiences the tiredness of repeated content discussed in mainstream media and how it results in depreciating the quality of truly intellectually stimulating discussion. However, this does not translate well enough, as in addition to the loss of tension from the repetitiveness, the developments in the second half of the film become rather predictable. The climax sequence almost spoon-feeds the audience how they are supposed to feel by blaring background scores sounding as Sabitha walks away in grandiose from the scopophilic gaze of the media. While the idea it starts with is engaging, the film moves away from freshness to drudgery rather quickly.
Vettapattikalum Oottakkarum runs like a social experiment, with a controversial event acting as an anchor to bait out the reactionary nature of Kerala society, eventually highlighting the delusional state of the state of Kerala. Despite its high rate of literacy and high life expectancy rate, unemployment, and a huge exodus of its youth, black money scandals are very real problems today. By focusing on and projecting personal ‘scandal’ to a wider viewership, the media (both journalist and consumer outlets) takes up the responsibility of distracting itself and others from real-world problems. Institutions of journalism that originally came up with the intent of producing objecting facts to its viewers for them to formulate informed opinions have now done a complete 360. Now, the media produces their opinion and creates news on their own while viewers are left with the task of sorting the facts from the opinion of popular media.
