Jayaraj's 'Hasyam' to enter Shanghai Film Festival

This is the eighth film in the director's decades-spanning 'Navarasa' series

Malayalam filmmaker Jayaraj’s ‘Navarasa’ series is the only venture of its kind in Indian cinema. A parallel that one could think of in world cinema is Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Dekalog’. While Jayaraj’s series explores the nine rasas embodied through rain, Kieslowski had looked at the Ten Commandments.

Jayaraj’s project may, in fact, be the more ambitious. Kieslowski’s work was composed of 10 one-hour episodes, each of which, at least on paper, reflect each of the commandments. They were made together and screened together, in 1988. Although ‘nine’ rasas mean one less category than ‘ten’ commandments, Jayaraj’s series has been a work in progress since the year 2000.

Now, the 8th film in the series, ‘Hasyam’, is all set for release. With this, ‘Sringaram’ will be the only film left to make.

The ‘Navarasa’ project was acclaimed right from the beginning. And it won Jayaraj awards at both of India’s biggest movie platforms -- the National Awards and the International Film Festival of India -- a claim only a handful of filmmakers can make.

The first film in the series, ‘Karunam’, which was about the loneliness that the elderly face, won him the Golden Peacock award for Best Film at the 31st International Film Festival of India. The second, ‘Shantham’, a film about murderous party politics, won him the National Award for Best Film.

But Jayaraj was not unused to glory of this sort before. A couple of years earlier, he had won the National Award for Best Director for ‘Kaliyattam’, his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’.

He would win the Best Director prize again in 2018 for ‘Bhayanakam’, the 6th film in the series, which spoke about how a postman, during the second World War, becomes a symbol of death because of the stream of bad news that he brings from the battlefield.

‘Hasyam’s’ release has been stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has been chosen in the Official Selection of the Shanghai Film Festival.

Jayaraj tells Showtime about his latest film: “(The series) started in 2000 with Karunam. I had originally planned it as the “nine rasas of the rain”. The original plan was to capture all the rasas of the rain in one film. Then I realised this may not be possible,” he says.

He explains how in each of the films, the rain becomes a character -- although a different character in each film -- thus: “ ‘Karunam’ was about how aging brings neglect from others. The rain in that film fell drop by drop. ‘Shantam’ was about the time between two torrents of rain. One storm is done and there is calm before the next; there is wetness all around you. One political murder has just occurred and the next is about to take place. The quiet in between is one where the preparation for murder silently happens. In ‘Bhayanakam’, it rains down pretty much like the second world war, during which the film is set.”

‘Hasyam’, as the name would suggest, is the first comedy in the series, dark though the humour may be. Jayaraj has made comic films in the past, but those were of a slapstick variety, designed to satiate commercial palates. ‘Hasyam’ is about a man who sells cadavers, which are notoriously difficult to come by, to private medical colleges. At first glance, it may remind you of Nikolai Gogol, though Jayaraj brought up no such reference. Chichikov in ‘Dead Souls’ goes around buying the identities of dead serfs, making his livelihood through the dealing of the eponymous “dead souls”.

Chichikov’s counterpart in ‘Hasyam’ is “Japan”, a nickname given in many places in Kerala to people who can get things done, no matter what devious means are chosen. “(Japan) is a cadaver agent, someone who supplies dead bodies to medical colleges. Death, for him, is a matter of sustenance. That’s where his world-view comes from. Every village must have a man named Japan. His real name would be something completely different, but people would call him Japan. ‘Japan’ isn’t a fraud, but is great at getting things done. 'He is such a Japan' is, in fact, an expression,” the director says.

“He waits for death and his misdemeanors are associated with death. The sort of things that the film shows have actually happened. If private medical college students don’t practice on cadavers, the colleges lose the licence. The private medical colleges in Kerala need 500 dead bodies at any given point. Government colleges don’t have this difficulty. Our man Japan is someone who takes advantage of this crisis.”

Jayaraj says that the film talks about how man and death become manure for one another. Symbolically, Japan even lives in Kottayam in an area where two train tunnels come one after another; trains get out of one dark passage into the light before entering another dark passage. This draws a parallel to the theme of life and death in the film.

‘Japan’ is played by Harishree Ashokan, a veteran comedian from Malayalam. He is known for slapstick comedy, including in Jayaraj’s own commercial ventures. Historically, some comedians known primarily for slapstick have taken up darkly comic performances that are ironic takes on their earlier, lighter performances. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, had played a wife-killer in the black comedy ‘Monsieur Verdoux’. Buster Keaton acted in Samuel Beckett’s minimalist 1965 film that was simply titled ‘Film’. Asked whether such a gesture was in mind when casting Ashokan, Jayaraj says no.

“Ashokan’s greatest quality is his body language. You can turn him into any of the many people around you. He can become a barber or a carpenter or a pickpocket; he will suit the role with both his gestures and his body itself. It was Ashokan who came to mind when I first thought of Japan. That was my only reason for casting him. I didn’t even consider anyone else. After writing the script, I called him and he was ready.”

The present crisis is one of getting a theatre release. Corona has created a queue for films to get release dates. Jayaraj’s earlier film ‘Ottal’, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story ‘Vanka’ that picked up a Crystal Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, was released directly to OTT platforms after its festival circuit. But the director wants a theatre release for ‘Hasyam’.

“I don’t mind OTT platforms, but theatres matter. The way you watch a film on an OTT platform is very different from the way you watch in a theatre. The feeling of watching a film in a group is different. Cinema, as an art form, developed through that. That culture has to continue. At the same time, we need OTT platforms because films such as ‘Ottal’, ‘Bhayanakam, ‘Roudram’ (the seventh in the series) and ‘Hasyam’ may run in theatres for, say, a week. But people who watch these on OTT platforms from around the world, both Malayalis and others, call me up to tell me about the film. But we still need theatres,” Jayaraj says.