Sillu Karupatti Analysis

Sillu Karupatti

Written & Directed by: Halitha Shameem

Available on Netflix

Watching anthologies is a different experience than watching films, they are not like watching a bunch of short films together either. When you are watching a film, in 20 minutes you know what you have signed up for and when you are watching a bunch of shorts, you never know what you are signing up for even when it's near the ending of the short. With anthologies, you kind of know what you've signed up for in terms of the theme and if it's the same film maker then the mood and the tone and yet you have new stories and setting within the film. With Wild Tales, there are 6 shorts in it, every short has a crisp and to the point opening because they don't want to bore you with establishing aerial shots in every short. It's the same here.

In the storytelling it's a weird balance that they figured out between, keeping the world grounded by having realistic situations, characters and depiction of daily lives but the extensive usage of background score romanticizes the world. The music is like a pat on the back to the sorrow of the lives of the characters. Yet, I couldn't figure out why they used so many jump cuts in the editing. It didn't complement the slow, laid back storytelling especially while portraying routine. I couldn't figure out what they wanted to convey with it, or if it was just used to crisp the duration further. I couldn't also get why they had to have cameos of characters from one short to another, that had no purpose in the storytelling other than the little joy of recognizing people. 

In the first segment, Pink Bag, the thing that bugs me most about the setting of this short is, most of the films ask us to feel sympathetic towards them. Parasite doesn't do that, the depiction of their lives is not done from a patronizing point of view. But, where this segment goes further in the film is so heartwarming and especially the ending of this short was so endearing that it makes us ready for the remaining films. In some characters, like the old lady in the third segment and the guy with testicular cancer it felt like the characters had interesting/dramatic things going on in their lives but the way they were written, it felt like someone's idea of those characters and not those characters. I didn't feel so while watching them but in retrospect when I think of the way they behaved I'm feeling that. The last segment was a more subtle way of exploring monotony in marriage, than what Sarjun KM did in his short Lakshmi. It had an interesting way of looking at things in this film, the armpit, the anklet and some more of this sorts.