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Not to beat The Passion to death, but Indian director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Shadow Kill offers more insight into the lessons of Christ than Mel Gibson’s splatterfest. We’re in pre-Independence, 1940s India, and Kaaliyappan (Oduvil Unnikrishnan), a provincial hangman, hasn’t been the same since he found out that his most recent client was innocent. He drinks heavily, teases his son about the latter’s Gandhian notions of non-violence and clean living, and in his spare time heals the sick by applying the ashes of his ceremoniously burned gallows rope (according to the opening prologue, a traditional cure). This mingling of the power of death and the gift of life, of the need for sacrificial victims and the elusiveness of redemption, bewilders poor Kaaliyappan and delights the filmmaker, who has a knack for subtle but devastating irony and an eye for arresting details and juxtapositions (the son’s spinning wheel intercut with prisoners spinning his father a new rope). The hangman’s sodden philosophizing becomes moot when the maharajah sentences another man to death and the film takes a diabolical twist. Gopalakrishnan at first evokes the humanism and lucidity of his mentor Satyajit Ray, but by the end he’s descended into the labyrinths of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. In Malayalam with English subtitles. (91 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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