Members of the Problematic Family

If the film’s story is a skull, Members of the Problematic Family, set in Red Hills, a suburb in North-West Chennai, smashes that skull, and trying to glue it back together, revels in its failure to do so. It is simply one of the most distinctive if disjunctive films to come out of India, filled with a fractured irreverence and putrefying rot, where scenes have the inertia of a hiccup and the texture of filth—liquor breath, burning vomit, spit, blood, and that eternal sheen of sweat. There is a funeral. There is the spectacle around it—which last year, Rohan Kanawade in Sabar Bonda imbued with gentle irony, which debutante R Gowtham here, instead, dials up by sticking microscopically close to the action, the dead body being passed around, held aloft, undressed and dressed, oiled, soiled with ash, garlanded, paraded, the nostrils being pressed close by a child, and eventually, caked in cow dung and hay, and even a smattering of alcohol, burnt to ash.

A new dissenting voice emerges in Tamil cinema. R Gowtham’s debut Tamil feature, Members of the Problematic Family, premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival last week in the Forum section. Everything about this film is distinct yet unfamiliar, beginning with its title. The Tamil title, Sikkalana Kudumbathin Uruppinargal, a literal translation, rolls off the tongue. For decades we’ve had the word kudumbam (family) in Tamil film titles that have often alluded to the spotless, divine status accorded to the unit. But here is a film that makes no such promise. It invites you not to witness a few days in the life of irascible characters but just human beings who, as fate would have it, need to function as a society sanctioned order.