Anantaram (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1987)

There is more truth in thoughts than in words.

For quite some time after the movie had ended, I was trying to think of the last time a movie had floored me and left me completely speechless like Anantaram, and the first thing that popped in my head was Persona, which incidentally enough dealt with something similar but the execution of the two movies cannot be further apart.

With Anantaram, Adoor Gopalkrishnan tries to explore his own bipolarity with the protagonist, Ajayan, and builds a character of him solely through his memories. But memories are ever-changing and ever deceiving, that take the shape of whatever is the situation at hand, and are terribly unreliable. This unreliability becomes the core of the narrative and through which Gopalkrishnan begins questioning the very identity of Ajayan. 

Along with the said unreliability, the duality is present almost throughout the movie and it's easy to choose one story over the other based on one's worldview and say one is reality and the other is an imagination of his life. But with unreliable narrator comes the added conundrum of the fact that both are equally deceptive and that thought raised twice as many questions as the ones I had when I finished the movie. Was Ajayan we saw at first the idealised version of what he thought he could be or was Ajayan a child prodigy who failed to reach the success he was expected to? Was Ajayan's torment a result of the burden of his talent or was it a direct correlation to the torture he faced at the hands of three house helps? Was Ajayan always jealous of Balu because of his achievements or was the jealously only because of his wife? Was Nalini ever real? Or was all of this true? Or none of it and it's a complete fabrication of a fractured mind? 

But above all, after I went through all of these questions the only thing that felt like a solution was that this stream of thinking was an exercise in vanity and that the different realities of Ajayan's life is true as long as he wants to believe it's true, and that reality ceases to exist once he rejects the said reality.

I know for certain I have only barely scratched the surface of the movie and I need a couple of rewatches to completely get the themes of what Adoor Gopalkrishnan was going for but as for now, I'll satisfy myself with what little I've understood of the movie.