'Naangal' Movie Review: An Unnerving Portrait of Parental Abuse and Affection

Director: Avinash Prakash
Cast: Abdul Rafe, Mithun V, Rithik Mohan, Nithin D, Prarthana Srikaanth, Sab John Edathattil, Roxy 
Language: Tamil

Sometimes you hear of parents so notorious, it is a miracle their child has not pushed them off a cliff — yet. Their violence shimmers in the nighttime apology. They apply balm over the wound they cause. Again and again. When guilt becomes an expression of loving, to be loved turns into an act of forced generosity; to accept this rose-stabbed gesture. To unpluck the thorns from your skin, muttering — 'you wanted to bathe me with roses, I understand'. 

A still from 'Naangal'.

Set in Ooty, and briefly, Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, and bathed in a hill-station afterglow, Avinash Prakash’s Naangal has three children who keep retrieving these thorns from their bodies, accepting their father’s apology every time he promises to turn over a new leaf.

What of their anger, then — what do they do with it? One of them dunks the father’s shaving brush in the toilet bowl. Cut-to, the father shaving — a long take. When the father, drunk out of his wits, apologises, weeps, and holds onto his sons, what do they do? They don’t hold him back. The father slumps onto the bed and demands his eldest son spark him a cigarette. After the first drag, he falls asleep, the child retrieving the burning cigarette before it can bore a hole into the bedsheet.

The father, Rajkumar (Abdul Rafe), once a National Education Champion winner, and chairman of their school, has now fallen on hard times, with no money to pay the bills and his staff. We first meet his three kids — Karthik (Mithun V), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — who are out and about, buying vegetables, watching movies, collecting water in jerry cans, renting books, and living life without the disciplining gaze of adult supervision. At night, they whip out candles and walk through their cavernous house. This, we will soon understand, is not fantasy playacting, but a material deprivation — no lights work in the mansion.

One lightning-struck night, they think a thief has entered their home. Maybe it is a ghost? No. It is their father — one of them, seeing his father’s frame, smoking coils of smoke into the nighttime air, wets his pants. He is brutal. He asks questions that are rhetorical but demands answers that are literal. These dinner table conversations, sometimes with the ticking of a clock or the clucking of cicadas, are burning with tension that threatens to erupt as a slap or a sigh. Rajkumar is wounded by his loss of status, but at home, you get the sense that he is wounded also by the stupidity of his kids, who never have anything clever or insightful to tell him. Worse, they never massage his ego. They whisper when he asks them to speak. He slaps them frequently.

A still from 'Naangal'.

The thing about a child’s love for the parent figure is that it leans so heavily on dependence — financially, if not emotionally — that to disentangle them becomes a troubling, Sisyphean act. Do you love your parents or has the dependence not yet slackened or clarified itself for what it is? Naangal, a memoir of Prakash’s growing-up years, is not interested in a clarification. It wants to stay close to the eyeline of the children in yawning, teasing stretches of scenes that circle around an unresolved feeling — love for the father, which might be fear, which might be resentment, which might not be love at all, but which is, ultimately, perhaps, love only. Who has ever loved a parent uncomplicatedly?

There is a mother, too, Padma (Prarthana Srikaanth), but she is so marginal in the movie, emerging and retreating at random, that the film sets up a provocation — by demanding the children be in his care, is the father performing love, a love the mother meekly and ineffectually performs?

A still from 'Naangal'.

The family’s dog, Kathy, features in two of the clenching, most dramatically staged moments of the film — the interval portion and the climax. Here, the questions of love for the father, the son, are set aside to focus on this new canine affection, and as the film concludes on this note, I wonder if it is convenient to brush aside the complicated love, or whatever it is the children share for their father by turning to the dog as a galvanising figure that brings them together? If a child can glue a broken marriage, then, surely, a dog can suture a broken family.

Naangal has a strange, staccato rhythm — luxuriating in moments, with these winding, unforgiving takes, and then jumping months ahead. It lounges into mushy flashbacks, throwing dates and timelines, making the film’s motions more jerky than fractured. 

The children apparently don’t show up at school for three months. The parents were married for fifteen years, after which they decided to part — just like that. It must be noted here that the original festival cut of the film is over four hours. The theatrical version of the film I caught is a little under two-and-a-half hours. The patches of fierce filmmaking that Prakash performs are a testament to the parts attempting to, stumbling towards the whole.