Expressions of the truth
New-age director
Sense. Sensitivity. Sensibility. Highlights of a stinging dialogue delivered by superstar Mammooty. Director Shyamaprasad’s films live up to each of these adjectives...
Espousing the Sahridaya philosophy of self as audience, filmmaking for him is an attempt at “recreating the experiential world of each of the stories as appropriately as I feel.” Known for his penchant for literary adaptations, Shyamaprasad’s kaleidoscope of talent calls for a closer look to better understand his rendering of cinema.
Schooled in Theatre Arts from School of Drama, Thrissur, Commonwealth scholarship took him to Hull University, UK where he was awarded a Masters in Media Production. Subsequent work with BBC, Channel Four and Doordarshan taught him the ropes of his trade. Along with many well-received documentaries and an Indo-American production called Bokshu the Myth (2002), his gamut gleams with five other Malayalam films.
In 1996, his directorial debut narrated Unni and Thethi’s marital liaison strained by pre-Independence Indian society in Agnisakhi (With Fire as Witness) which won him the National Award for Best Director. Though delighted at this recognition he does not work towards an award. He filters his films through his own sense of quality judgement and makes movies that match up to his own expectations of a good film, ones he would like to watch.
Impatiently awaited in Kerala is his latest psycho-sensual drama, Elektra. The name pings into memory greek tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides (about Electra who wanted her brother to avenge their father’s death by murdering their mother) while simultaneously giving off a Freudian stench of Electra complex, every daughter’s sexual attraction to her father. Set in central Kerala, and starry with Nayantara, Manisha Koirala, Suraj Skanda and Prakashraj, family bonds are tested through desire and loss in this cauldron of primal energy.
Elektra with its dark undertones is expected to offset Ritu, his last cinematic endeavour. Ritu is a youthful tale of childhood friends who a loss of innocence later reconsider their friendship. Glance at them as confident experiments by a director who has come of age and a sharp retort catches you unawares saying, “I think as an artist I have no right to offer the audience what I ‘experiment’. To paraphrase Andrie Tarkovsky — that would be immoral. An artist must struggle to express the truth that he finds about life, not engage in experimentation.”
Since the 1998 box-office disaster called Kallu Kondoru Pennu (Woman of Stone) Shyamaprasad has never had a black friday. Released in 2004, Akale (At a Distance) is the story of a youth caught between his responsibilities to himself and those to his family. 2007 saw Ore Kadal (The Sea Within) talk about the angst love bestows on both a middle class woman and a rational economist who are lovelicked. 
The aspect of filmmaking that gets him out of bed everyday essentially snips grouses. “I get a kick working with the actors, honestly. I am not too excited about setting up a mind-blowing shot, or a spectacular effect, or a thrilling cut or anything else. I love the moment I work with the actor — the living element on my frame, and work along with them to find that exact moment of truth in representing that particular character — word by word. Then, I love working on the sound track — music and the ambient effects. It is quite orgasmic for me to experience the sound merging with the image.”
From the human drama corner of the filmmaking ring, Shyamaprasad overpowers the query about handling physical intimacy and the audience by clinching that as he is not into the titillation business he has never had a problem with the Censor Board even while handling potentially dangerous content. “In the developing world, especially in the Malayali milieu, the socio-cultural conflicts are far too many,” he says. “Yes, my films try to address them at different levels. But I did not compromise much on my ideas and opinions in any of them.”
Living in a society where male bigotry is commonplace, he bases who he is today on being brought up in an atmosphere of gender respect, trust, love and “more importantly, of compassion.” However, allergic to being compartmentalised, when you bring into focus that women characters have lived noteworthy screen lives in his movies, he blurs them away as subjective interpretation. “Ironically,” he says, “in Agnisakshi I was criticised for highlighting the male character Unni, as the principal, empathy evoking character — as opposed to Thethi who was generally considered as the hero of that novel which the film was based on.”
Minimalist in style, this auteur weaves complicated worlds of human spectacle laced with exquisite music fine tuned to the cultivated taste of the Sahridaya.
