This is an Indian film without song and dance. The lovers do not share a word, their primary interaction is a fleeting moment of eye contact in the rainy season. No car chases and no action stunts. Men are weak. They cried.
But when “Kaathal — The Core,” a Malayalam-language film about a closeted middle-aged politician, released last month, it became a commercial success as well as a critical one. Theaters are sold out in the southern state of Kerala, home to the Malayalam film industry and about 35 million people. That one of South India’s biggest stars took on the role of a gay man, and portrayed him so sensitively, started conversations beyond Kerala.
Outside India, the country’s cinema is often equated with the glamor and noise of Bollywood, as the dominant, Hindi-language film industry is called. But in this vast country of 1.4 billion, there are many regional industries whose styles are as diverse as their languages. “Kaathal” is the latest example of what Malayalam cinema has become known for: low-budget progressive stories, nuanced and charged with real human drama.
What sets it apart from other theaters in the region, observers say, is that it has found a rare balance. Increasingly, Kerala audiences are turning out as enthusiastically for these modest Malayalam-language stories of everyday people as they are for high-adrenaline blockbusters, often imported from elsewhere. of India.
The result has been a commercial success for the kind of low-key films seen elsewhere as experimental, more often than not relegated to festival circuits or sent straight to streaming platforms.
“We have an amazing audience here,” said Jeo Baby, “Kaathal’s” director. “The same audience creates success for mass films and at the same time for small films and comedies.”
Malayalam cinema’s subtle storytelling has gained more exposure in the post-Covid era. The rapid expansion of streaming services in India that began with the pandemic, and the competition for new content, has created space for regional cinema to find national and global audiences.
Bollywood, for its part, initially struggled to lure audiences back to theaters post-Covid. Its recent high-grossing films have mostly relied on well-worn storylines, injected with more violence, increasingly slick visual effects and heavy doses of populism and propaganda. Superstars still dominate Bollywood, and an atmosphere of censorship and self-censorship dominant.
“There are many more interventions out there,” said Swapna Gopinath, a professor of film and cultural studies at the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication in the city of Pune. “That makes it difficult for independent cinema to thrive.”
Until recently, Ms. Gopinath, Malayalam cinema was no different: It featured films with big-name actors and recycled storylines, often celebrating traditional, patriarchal values.
But that changed about a decade ago, then some pushing the boundaries movies of young directors had popular success. It’s an assertion that audiences in Kerala, which leads India in living standards, are open to experimental, nuanced content.
“From there, the scape of cinema has changed as far as Malayalam cinema is concerned,” Ms. Gopinath said. “We started having films that talked about gender, about caste.”
A study of recent Malayalam films by Ormax Media, a consulting firm, found that three-quarters of them were small town dramas that the main characters are ordinary people, not larger than life heroes. The subjects are often modest and local — such as the turbulent politics of widening of the small village road when everyone has a bet, or a priest in a new chapel haunted by the history of space as a soft-porn cinema.
Mr. Baby, who directed “Kaathal,” is known for focusing on what is often overlooked in everyday life. He first gained wide recognition two years ago in “The Great Indian Kitchen,” a meditation on the impact of misogyny on a family.
When the writers of “Kaathal” approached him with their story about the struggles of a closeted gay man, the director said he thought of only one actor for the role: Mammootty, a 72-year-old star with many followers in Kerala.
He plays Mathew Devassy, a retired, married bank clerk with a daughter in college. As he prepares to run in the village elections, his wife, played by actress Jyotika, files for divorce because she has known throughout their marriage that he is gay, and has quietly had a male lover. The film has courtroom scenes, but it centers on the silence of the household, the rumors that spread in the village and Mathew’s inner struggle.
Mammootty’s decision to star in and produce “Kaathal” helped keep the film, and the subject it tackles, in the public eye, Mr. Baby.
India legalized gay sex five years ago, and its Supreme Court recently rejected a petition to legalize same-sex marriage, although it said same-sex relationships should be respected.
Jijo Kuriakose, an actor and activist in the Kerala city of Kochi, said “Kaathal” sensitively dealt with the social pressures that force many gay Indians to live a homogenous life.
It was almost a decade ago that he almost got married to a woman, but instead he walked out on his family on the night of his engagement. His parents still urge him to marry a woman, he said.
“‘OK, you are homosexual, we understand, but marry a woman’ – this has been a common response for many years,” said Mr. Kuriakose.
The film has sparked a lot of discussion in Kerala and beyond about how caste, class, gender and religion affect the choices available to the characters. Sreelatha Nelluli, a poet and translator who recently married a closeted gay man, said the film hit close to home.
“I liked your expressions, always confused and almost scared,” Ms. Nelluli wrote to Mammootty and mr. Baby in an open letter. “You understood and included this person.”
But while praising the film for lending “a voice to the voiceless,” Ms. Nelluli said this made the exit process faster and simpler than would have been possible in reality. After his wife told him the truth, he said, 15 years passed before they shared it with other family members.
“Once he came out to me 15 years ago, I went into that closet with him,” she wrote.
For Mr. Kuriakose, this subtle Malayalam film is perhaps sometimes too subtle. He was disappointed that it did not show the intimacy of the lovers, and that their story, unlike heterosexual romances in most Indian films, was not given a beginning. At no point in the film do we learn how the two men met.
“Some people really enjoy subtle expressions,” Mr. Kuriakose said. “As a strong person, I like to see ‘unsubtle’ expressions.”
Deepa Kurien contributed reporting.
