{"id":76,"date":"2021-05-26T12:05:05","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T16:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/?p=76"},"modified":"2021-05-26T12:05:29","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T16:05:29","slug":"kalla-nottam-the-false-eye-dir-rahul-riji-nair-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/2021\/05\/26\/kalla-nottam-the-false-eye-dir-rahul-riji-nair-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Kalla Nottam (\u201cThe False Eye\u201d, dir. Rahul Riji Nair, 2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 29, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A shopkeeper is gifted a GoPro camera from his brother who works in the Gulf, but he decides that the most practical use of the device would be to record what happens in his shop, a kind of artisanal CCTV.  The irony in all this, of course, is that while he steps out of his shop for a moment, a boy runs in and steals the camera.  Ten-year-old Vincent (Vasudev Sajeesh Marar) meets up with his friend, Kishore (Suryadev Sajeesh Marar), who worries about whether they\u2019ll be caught for stealing, but Vincent tells him not to worry, they\u2019ll return it.  When Kishore wonders why he\u2019d steal it in the first place, if they\u2019re only going to return it, Vincent\u2019s reply is that he wants to try making a film.  Kishore immediately wants to be the film\u2019s hero, and when Vincent hesitates, wondering if his friend even looks like a film hero, Kishore insists that he either becomes the hero, or he\u2019ll tell the police about the theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two boys are like many of us when first presented with a new toy \u2013 they begin playing around with it, randomly filming anything that catches their attention, with Kishore acting up in order to do anything to be on camera, much to the annoyance of Vincent.  Kishore suggests that they\u2019ll also need a heroine for their film, and they start by asking another friend, Rosy (Ansu Maria Thomas), to play the part.  Kishore enjoys the chance to play the hero, putting on sunglasses and pretending to smoke a cigarette (\u201cEvery hero smokes a cigarette,\u201d he affirms when Vincent wonders what he\u2019s doing).  And much of the interest and humour in the early part of the film comes from viewing what the children know about filmmaking based on the films they\u2019ve seen.  Rosy sings and dances to \u201cEntammede Jimikki Kammal\u201d, the song from Lal Jose\u2019s Velipadinte Pusthakam<\/strong> that enjoyed great popularity when it came out.  Kishore, on the other hand, is a total ham, insisting on being the centre of every frame, forcing his way into the frame first by dancing in the background, and then by pushing Rosy aside, telling Vincent that the hero has to be in front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An argument breaks out amongst the three friends, with Kishore continuing to insist that Rosy is a terrible actor and they shouldn\u2019t use her, that he is the hero and that\u2019s who people come to see, and that he had to cut into her scene because she was so terrible and even just stopped acting partway through, finally breaking into the song \u201cScene Contra\u201d from Premam<\/strong>, essentially telling Vincent that Rosy is not needed (as the lyrics suggest, \u201cavalu vendra, ivalu vendra\u201d, not needed, not wanted).  Rosy, fed up, refuses to participate in their film.  Furthermore, when Rosy learns the camera is stolen, she tells Vincent that his film will not prosper, because her father told her you never prosper with things that aren\u2019t your own.  Learning that the camera is stolen is the last straw for Rosy, who heads home, leaving the two boys on their own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discouraged, Vincent thinks that Rosy might be right, that their film is ill-fated from the start, so the boys decide they should return the camera.  After several failed attempts to find a place to leave the camera that won\u2019t implicate them in the theft, Kishore returns home, and Vincent meets some men he knows on a bridge, who confront him about why he has the camera, learn he has stolen it when they check the footage on it, and then use it themselves to film a couple making out in the woods, oblivious that they are not only being watched, but that they are also being filmed.  Worse, the woman turns out to be Kishore\u2019s sister, Neenu (Vinitha Koshy).  A brawl breaks out, and everyone involved, Kishore, his sister, her boyfriend and his friend, and the men who tried to film the couple, all end up at the police station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final section of the film, set in the police station, shows us that the camera only reveals part of the story here \u2013 perhaps why the film is called \u201cThe False Eye\u201d \u2013 it may show us what was happening between Neenu and her boyfriend Sachin, and it contradicts at points the lies the men tell (essentially, that it was the others who started things, that Vincent was there to film his sister, when clearly they\u2019ve taken the camera from him and are the ones filming, since he\u2019s in the frame).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cameras can reveal what is hidden, or what is in the background, not immediately apparent to the person holding the camera.  What\u2019s more interesting than what the boys film is often what ends up in the background, or shot by chance.  Even then, what the camera records might not always be the whole truth.  The police inspector looks at the camera footage, but that only tells him part of the story.  It\u2019s when he investigates further, when he looks at the phones of the boyfriend and his friend, that it\u2019s discovered that Neenu was already a victim even before the \u201cmoral policemen\u201d (the men on the bridge) turned up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revelation is devastating for Neenu, and this is the moment when we begin to understand the B.R. Ambedkar quote at the beginning of the film: \u201cI measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.\u201d\u00a0 How much progress have women attained?\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s Rosy, reduced to playing a secondary role to a hero who only ridicules her abilities, or Kishore\u2019s mother, arguing with her husband about his wanting to sign over their home for what will likely be yet another failed business, while she\u2019s the one who works and keeps the household running properly, or Neenu, trusting in a man she loved, and who believed he loved her, but is betrayed by him?\u00a0 How do you judge a community\u2019s progress when at every stage of a woman\u2019s life \u2013 childhood, adolescence, adulthood \u2013 the boys and men in their lives act in ways to diminish them, to the point of tragedy?\u00a0\u00a0Kalla Nottam<\/strong>, the false eye of the camera, makes no judgements; it merely reveals how ingrained misogyny is, even from a very young age, and how quickly child\u2019s play can turn to tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 29, 2020. A shopkeeper is gifted a GoPro camera from his brother who works in the Gulf, but he decides that the most practical use of the device would be to record what happens in his shop, a kind of artisanal…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingKalla Nottam (\u201cThe False Eye\u201d, dir. Rahul Riji Nair, 2020)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[98,93,7,63,97,96,95,94,99],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ansu-maria-thomas","tag-kalla-nottam","tag-malayalam","tag-malayalam-cinema","tag-rahul-riji-nair","tag-suryadev-sajeesh-marar","tag-the-false-eye","tag-vasudev-sajeesh-marar","tag-vinitha-koshy","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/80"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}