This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 1, 2019.
After the death of her mother, Anna leaves with her father for Madras, leaving behind Seba – before she leaves, she tells Seba he must continue to make toys for her in all colours.
As an adult, Seba (Noel Raphael) recounts this event, speaking about how devasting this loss was to him – so much so that it becomes an obsession for Seba, causing him to leave his mother and live on his own, and to fill a house with toys he’s made, firm in the belief and hope that Anna must return to him. Seba’s home is set up not unlike a child’s blanket fort, with a tent of netting that contains the toys he’s made, and in which he makes toys out of materials he has scavenged from the garbage dump – old bottles, coloured cellophane, tissue paper.
Seasons change, the monsoon arrives, and instead of Anna, there is Radha (Sunitha) asking Seba to make toys for her. But when Seba gives Radha a necklace of acorns, telling her it’s hers, she becomes confused, not understanding why he is giving her this necklace instead of the toy she’s asked him to make. Seba, it seems, is living in a world where his past and his present are muddled in a dreamlike state, where he is so determined to have Anna return to him that he confuses Radha for her.
At the same time that he finds himself on the run with Radha (she has spent the night with him, and the neighbourhood is after them) Seba receives phone calls from his mother, who, it seems, is ill: she wants him to help take her to the hospital, she tells him she will die soon, so Seba takes Radha with him to see her, Seba telling his mother that this is Anna. Seba’s mother dies soon afterwards, leaving him reeling from the shock of yet another loss. Radha remains with Seba, assuming the persona of Anna, and the two seem to have a child with them, who is named Radha. The lines of identity blur and reform as if viewed through a kaleidoscope. With the supposed return of Anna, these lines are confused even further, with the child Radha taking on the persona of a toy that Seba claims he has made for Anna, during a season in which he believes that his toys come alive.
The film is shot in both in black and white (for dreamlike states and remembrances of the past) as well as washed out tones, giving it a look of old colour photographs faded over time, and the film’s songs play out like redolent lullabies, recalling childhood, and adding to the state of confusion and nostalgia that Seba – caught between past and present – frequently inhabits. Kalippaattakkaaran is not a film for everyone, but its meditations on loss and impermanence are thoughtful and thought-provoking, if also, at times, confusing. The rains come. The rains go. And if we want to live in the past, we must sacrifice our present to do so.