'Jallikattu'

The visually haunting interval sequence of ‘Jallikattu’ establishes with certainty the underlying message of the film - that the line between man and beast is ultimately arbitrary, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise.

As night falls in the forest, Pellissery depicts this in a number of ways. Set in rural Kerala, he shrouds all his characters (including the buffalo) in constant, vibrant foliage and creates similarly composed shots for both the angry village-men and the buffalo, establishing a level playing field between the two. As Antony chases the buffalo and finds it fallen down into a borewell, his instinctive move is not only to lie and take credit for trapping it, but to insist to the other men that he should be the one to kill it too. He naturally wishes to establish himself as the alpha male and has subscribed to the notion that doing so means being the one to indulge in the hyper-aggressive action of killing the beast himself, that too in front of all the other villagers. The men arriving down the hill, following Antony’s announcing cries of having trapped the bull, do so in a manic fashion. Accompanied by a soundtrack of primal, haka-esque chants and pounding drums, their flashlights and fire torches wave around wildly, disorienting the audience and hypnotically drawing us into the scene.

As they point their flashlights down the well and begin to throw torches and sticks down at the buffalo, rotating shots from the animal’s POV shows us the ring of bright lights pointed down at it. Combined with the soundtrack, this once again contributes to the disorienting madness that Pellissery evokes in the behaviour of the men. I find most interesting how these rage-filled, disorienting scenes of the movie are by far the most immersive and engaging, almost as if Pellissery is pointing the finger at the audience so as to say, ‘look, you too can’t help but enjoy indulging in this feral, primitive behaviour’. After some dispute, everybody decides on using ropes to pull the buffalo up from the well, and while Antony and others head off to fetch rope and wooden poles, the men set up a sort of camp with torches and a firepit. We are introduced to an old man, who clearly highlights to us how we deceive ourselves as to the nature of the differences between man and beast, telling us that though we “may walk around on two legs, we are still beasts”.

During all of this commotion, a man who is desperately trying to put together a meal for his daughter’s wedding is frantically rushing around the village looking for meat, yelling mocking insults at his family members and going so far as to almost steal a chicken from another person’s house. Simultaneously, Antony is shown forcing himself upon his own wife by pushing her up against a wall and kissing her, grunting all the while as she tries to push him off. Here Pellissery shows us that in moments of crisis, what comes naturally to us is the biological instincts to eat and mate, which further blurs the line between man and beast.

Once the buffalo has been pulled up, it manages to escape as rain falls and turns the soil to mud, causing the men to slip and lose a hold of their grip on the ropes. Pellissery establishes once again a level playing field, showing us that under the forces of nature we are all equal, man and beast alike. To drive the overall point home, the scene ends with a hoof-print in the mud shown right next to the footprint of a man.