This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 7, 2020.
“In between the celebrations of life, death enters unexpectedly.”
Ravishankar (Mammootty) is a respected writer and journalist who finds himself dying of blood cancer. He’s looked after by his wife, Malini (Gautami), and their close friend Rajendran (Manoj K. Jayan). Ravishankar’s doctor prescribes another treatment for him, but Ravishankar is unwilling to proceed with it. He’s seen it fail in another patient, and he has decided that rather than see his friends and family waste their time and money, that he will accept that it is his fate to die. He decides to return to his ancestral home, preferring to spend his last days there rather than in the hospital. Ravi wants no more medical experimentation – he just wants to die in peace.
He’s greeted by his aunt, Cheriyamma (Kaviyoor Ponnamma) and meets his childhood sweetheart, Durga (Shanthi Krishna). The former cries and prays for him, the latter looks after him when his wife (who is a teacher who isn’t permitted a leave from her job) and Rajendran cannot be there to help.
Ravi begins the process of dying, of dealing with what will happen after he is gone. He knows that Rajendran loves Malini, and that Malini probably has some feelings for him as well, so he speaks to each of them and encourages them to pursue this relationship and get married after he dies. He arranges what will happen with the ancestral property afterwards (so that his aunt and her children can be looked after, as well as providing for Malini). He meets with people from his newspaper so they can be aware he will not return to work. Durga, who has never married and is obviously still in love with him, vows to look after him until the end. Everything, it seems, is in place, and Ravi is ready to die in peace.
But things don’t go exactly as planned. A friend, who had brought Ravi a book on the mind-body connection (which Ravi refused to read), brings one of the doctors who participated in the book to see Ravi. It turns out Dr. Unni (Narendra Prasad) is someone Ravi has met before, and he manages to convince Ravi to come to a hospital he is setting up in Ooty, where Ravi can be part of a holistic treatment therapy, doing yoga, eating well, undergoing ayurvedic treatments. Ravi is, at first, sceptical; every treatment he’s tried so far hasn’t worked. But Dr. Unni suggests that even though Ravi is right, his doctor has done everything he can for him, the missing piece in his treatment has been his own acceptance of death, and his lack of will to do anything he can to survive. Ravi is convinced. He participates whole-heartedly in what the holistic treatment centre has to offer, and they find that his health actually begins to improve, to a point where Dr. Unni believes it is worth trying another round of chemotherapy. Ravi’s cancer goes into remission, and he returns to his ancestral home ready to live again, continuing to do the things he learned at the centre to help himself, and even considers returning to the writing life he left behind when he turned to journalism.
What Ravi discovers, however, is that everyone around him is reacting in ways he never anticipated. His loving aunt, who cried and prayed for him, seems more indifferent, complaining about having to prepare his ayuvedic medicines. His uncle Cheriyachan (Oduvil Unnikrishnan), who had undertaken to deal with the legalities of the ancestral property, is annoyed that he put out the time and money to do it, when Ravi no longer sees the need to change things, as he’s now not facing death. Malini and Rajendran, who initially objected to Ravi’s idea that they pursue their relationship, find themselves unwilling to go back to how things were before. He visits the office where he worked, to find his office has been assigned to someone else – and while looking through the drawers of his desk, he finds his obituary, already written and ready to print. Even Durga, who vowed to be with him forever, turns her back on him – as she tells him, it was different when he was dying, but now that he’s alive, he still has a wife (for the time being), and that changes everything. Ravi’s reasoning is that everything he said and did was because he believed he would die, and seemed like the best action given his circumstances. But he soon realizes that it’s easier said than done to return things to the way they were before his recovery; worse, he sees that his life has now become a burden for everyone around him. His good deed – trying to make his death more bearable for those around him – results in his own life becoming unbearable. In a very moving scene, Ravi goes to see Dr. Unni, to tell him that although his treatments and philosphy are great things, he must in the future refrain from bringing patients back from the brink of death – a better use of his skills, Ravi thinks, is to make sure that patients are able to have a dignified death, free of suffering, and free of the sympathy of the living in those final moments – a sympathy grounded, Ravi suggests, in the idea that the living are relieved and grateful that it’s not them that is sick. Much to Dr. Unni’s horror, Ravi suggests that if the patient can will himself to get better, then could he not will his illness to return? Dr. Unni pleads with Ravi to ignore this way of thinking, to respect the powers – his own will, his commitment to the therapy, and even God – that allowed his cancer to go into remission.
Mammootty’s performance in Sukrutham is understated and powerful – not unlike the more recent Unda (2019) – I found myself utterly transfixed by the fact that his character spends large portions of the film lying in bed, ill, and yet, his performance is compelling and riveting – you can’t take your eyes off him, even at his most haggard, his eyes alternately filled with sadness, exhaustion, and pain.
Sukrutham is also a masterful piece of film writing from M. T. Vasudevan Nair, the distinguished writer and director who won four National Awards for Best Screenplay, for his films Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989, and still widely regarded as one of Mammootty’s best films), Kadavu (1991), Sadayam (1992), and Parinayam (1994). He was also the writer of the more recent 2009 film Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja, also directed by Hariharan and starring Mammootty. But Sukrutham isn’t on a scale of Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja or Oru Vadakkan Veragatha – it’s a subtle, subdued film, exploring the theme of death from the perspective not only of the person dying, but how it affects the people around him. We can, on some level, understand Ravi – he has come to terms with his fate, and doesn’t want to see the people around him suffer unnecessarily because he’d spent too much money chasing after treatments he believes will no longer be effective. And we can see ourselves in the people around him – doing what they think is the right thing under the circumstances in order to make Ravi’s last days bearable, but unable to hide what they really want or think once they realize that he is recovering. Are they selfish? Yes, perhaps, but M.T. Vasudevan Nair creates characters that are complex, with grey shades, leaving us conflicted in how we feel about them. His central character, Ravi, is the lens through which we see these people and understand them, even when we can see how heartbreaking it is for Ravi to realize that for them, he would be better off dead. There is, he discovers, no way to return their lives back to the way they were before his recovery. Ravi makes a choice that is heartbreaking, but is, in a sense, the last of his good deeds: he writes his own obituary, and walks away from life.