Avihitham

Senna Hegde’s Avihitham opens with the tagline “Made in Kanhangad.” Where is Kanhangad? And what makes anything made there special, let alone a film? For those who discovered Malayalam cinema during the lockdown, the state might seem like a uniform patchwork of modern ideas and shared sensibilities. Avihitham, which examines adultery, is steeped in its local dialect, landscape, and cultural texture. It can very much amuse someone from Kerala’s Kottayam or Kollam despite never being a utopia. What remains universal here, though, is the social morality that thrives on exposing a “fallen woman,” teaching her a lesson, and eventually discarding her.

There are many things women in India are terrified of, and with good reason. Walking on a lonely road after dark, being a lone female traveller in a bus, checking and double checking the surroundings before opening one’s car door, checking the bathrooms in public places for hidden cameras, verifying if hotel rooms are safe, if trial rooms are safe, if online chats are safe… in every single place, a woman is reduced to her body, and her individuality erased. Senna Hegde’s delightful yet punch-to-the-gut Avihitham (translates into illicit) adds one more to the list — a male tailor proudly claims he can size up a woman’s chest, waist and hip just by seeing her. Thanks sir, one more thing to be very afraid about.

The simplest of stories, even the seemingly unappealing ones, can turn into fairly engaging pieces of cinema once it gets into the right hands. In Avihitham, filmmaker Senna Hegde, who co-wrote the film with Ambareesh Kalathera, does not have an elaborate story to tell, but teases out several strands out of it to pull off something which keeps one engaged.

If anyone else had written Avihitham apart from Senna Hegde and Ambareesh Kalathera, the second scene of the film would perhaps have become the first scene. It’s the scene in which the plot revolves around a village drunkard who catches a couple making out in the darkness in one corner of a coconut grove. Like the setup of a film like Knives Out (2019), the film plays out like a twisted investigation as the entire village comes together to find out the whereabouts of this couple, all for the vicarious pleasures of seeing someone else’s family fall apart.