Sivapuranam - The strange case of Siva
Inauthentic movie review
Today was an uncharacteristically cold day in the middle of a really hot Canadian summer week. I decided to rewatch one of my absolute favourite films to come out of my home country, India, called Sivapuranam. The Tamil language film is the first feature of Arun Karthick, the man whose next film Nasir, would go on to make him the most promising Indian filmmaker in recent times.
One day Siva was sitting in the mountains, he had given up on all bodily needs of his. He didn’t eat, sleep or take a shit- he just meditated & forgot about the world he helped create. Then, a beggar came up to his haven and asked him for food since he was hungry. That was when Siva went on his hero’s journey as a human beggar, surviving the world from his perspective. That’s the spine of Sivapuranam, the mythical tale.
Sivapuranam accomplishes many feats in its brilliantly silent execution of a modern-day eastern tale- it wraps itself around the concept of infinity quite comfortably. The film begins with strokes of a rock guitar piercing through shots of the protagonist, Siva, riding a motorbike on a road at night.
Arun gives us paintings in every frame he offers. The camera paints us images from impressionist and surreal art movements, it stays still as the action unfolds in the frame. Camera owns the fact that it is an inanimate object staring at something that flows- reality, a human being, a story and a myth. By being still the camera reinforces its artificiality giving the viewer an eerie sense of their own existential reality.
The main conflict remains inwardly, the protagonist Siva, who is a graphic designer, finds himself obsessing over an accidental image he clicked. The importance of accidental epiphanies is highlighted in this choice- how accidents trigger ideas, madness, inventions and move the human race forward in very peculiar ways.
Charu Nivedita wrote in his book “Unfaithfully Yours” about a cat named Chintu- who sleeps, eats and lies around all day. He wrote about how he’s a cat so he can live his entire life that way- never smoking or drinking- never obsessing or thinking. A man can never live like that, asserts Charu.
The presence of cats in the film inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Dancing Serpent has multi-fold connotations. One of course, is boredom; next- their demeanor and the way they sit, live and play like kings of the open space- something the protagonist does himself.
The image he has procured is the dancing serpent for Siva, who clearly has nowhere to rid him of his libido. He channelizes his libido into an obsession and tries to figure his bodily needs and how he can project them. The director is interested in how this man lives as a man to be the graphic designer he is. We see the reality how Siva may see it- changing in its constant permanence. The imagery deludes and seduces us how it must delude and seduce Siva, the music provides us a thought Siva might have. We see him cooking and eating, but it is not the food but rather the movements of his hands, mouth and throat that we witness.
The camera hovers in some scenes and as music fills in the usually silent film set in a beautiful hilly place in Tamil Nadu, we experience when Siva does- a pagan call from the past. It is a blatant secret of human existence that happens everyday to us in different frequencies, when we are interacting with our reality that we feel our gut sends us a message from beyond the womb and tomb- some call it tripping out, some interpret it as a familiar emotion- a deja vu- an emotion that overtakes us for a few split seconds to remind us our chthonian roots. This I believe, is the masterstroke this film plays at an unconscious level. The camera stops being a mere observer in these sequences and actively participates, tracing the mind voice of Siva.
The film drives up to the point where Siva has a visitor, who is not described as a friend or a relative- but just another human being that sits with our protagonist. It is a simple scene but it feels like a violent intrusion of Siva’s space- since we are used to seeing him interact with his thoughts, sexuality and feminine energy for the entirety of the film. We become defensive of Siva’s universe and we soak in the fact that the visitor has his own world- just like Siva’s. It is conveyed in a very beautiful, subtle manner which involves a simple gesture of changing the song that Siva played on his phone- by the visitor.
The non-linearity of the film stays true to its eastern storytelling roots- as tragedy and climax remain a Western invention, the divine comedy that the Greek blessed us with is closer to the mythology Indian consciousness is built upon. The film feels like experiencing an infinity and I do not say this lightly- it reminded me of the time I finished Charu Nivedita’s Zero Degree sitting in Valparai, a gorgeous hill station in Tamil Nadu- the whole experience felt like I was seeing so many things, taking so many paths but in the end I realised I was standing in the same place, looking at everything around me from different angles- all of them- I had just taken a 360 degree spin- my feet had never left the ground.
The beauty of our eastern and pagan roots stays throughout the film as we are bombarded with landscapes, cats and trees- the camera interacting with its reality as a brush dipped in colour would with a blank canvas.
The tricky part of course is the fact that the canvas is not blank. The cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi is patient and kind with the mammoth task he successfully pulls off, actor Rajesh Balachandran acts with every fiber of his body and dances with the camera beautifully- as the film demands of him. The textures in every frame condense in the viewer’s mind, cementing the perspective it is trying to conceptualise, layer by layer.
The filmmaker meditates, and he takes us along in his spiritualisation. As Camille Paglia notes in Sexual Personae, “Spiritual enlightenment produces feminization of the male.” We see this thesis being proven over and over, subtly, by a number of choices- the first being the choice of name, ‘Siva’. He is known for his powerful destructive demeanor and acts in mythology books- a feminine trait that brings him near his wife’s chthonian avatar, that of Kaali. Then of course comes the main theme of the film, which is Siva’s voyeurism which develops as he goes deeper into his sexual exploration.
European and American cinema has treated their sexual problems in their own perspective- be it American Beauty (Sam Mendes) or Raw (Julia Ducournau) or Masculin Feminin (Godard) - this dance between the two sexes has always beckoned cinema as has violence. Sivapuranam achieves the feat of exploring it in the most Indian way possible- indirectly. There’s more secrecy than drama- although it is all happening in front of us- Siva would rather play with the image of his object than the object itself. He tries to capture it in the walls of his house, in the lens of his projector. This is his biggest self-destructive tactic.
As Siva completes his personal hero’s journey, the last scene signifies how he is now ready to face an external hero’s myth that’s waiting for him outside his comfort zone.
Snakes and serpents have continually signified the daemonic element of sex, which births us, frustrates us and kills us all. It makes our lives hell and worth living at the same time. It sits on this contradiction like it is all so normal. Siva signifies the great male problem of sexual desires- whilst being contemplative and existential. It is modern, for the modern man is mellow. It is subversive, for the eastern modern man is subversive to the feminine nature. But he is still obsessed, for he stalks- in the way that he deems harmless.
Sivapuranam stands proudly as a pure piece of eastern cinema. It is a rare treat for Indians who want to feel their existentialism justified with the flavours of their own country,. The nonchalant observation of boredom and existentialism by Siva is Indian, for it is dotted by this feeling of happy helplessness. As the Tamil author Ashokamitran remarks in his novella “Mole”, when one cannot do anything about a situation, a strange calm takes over.
Siva sleeps, obsesses, smokes and eats. He does this without much visible or overt anxiety. His feminine muse has him gripped at pixels of an image and he is alright with it. His angst is perpetual, and he takes the entire film to accept it.
Sivapuranam treats its imagery in nature sexually, the loneliness and savagery signified in the same way Tarkovsky did in Ivan’s Childhood.
Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time". By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. Dir. Arun borrows this and incorporates it in his own style.
Arun Karthick’s love affair with nature and its complex textures can be seen in his past short films like ‘Backwaters’ as well. It tells us how he sees nature as an intrinsic part of storytelling, his tales authentically building dams on the flow of water, which is reality.
The reason this review was hard to write is because it is very difficult to decipher Sivapuranam. It does not have what you expect a film to have, it teases and challenges us. It is new and it makes no compromises- which might carve it away from some viewers. It does not have overt violence or sex, nothing to keep you hooked as a viewer. Yet, it miraculously holds us hostage as we watch it, gripped in Siva’s obsession like it is our own.
It is a psychedelic experience and the sanctity of such an experience lies in what it offers, not the words that describe it. It is a film that hits each viewer differently.
I’ll round up the review with a quote by Ashokamitran- which for me defined the state of Siva’s mind by the end of the film. Hunger of course, can be of any kind- food, sex, purpose.
“My life had indeed become meaningless to me. Even lack of sleep was not a concern for me; only hunger remained a sensation worthy of articulation. Once that hunger was assuaged, I would return to my inert state.”
― Ashokamitran, The Ghosts of Meenambakkam