Ivana Miloš, The Paper Flower (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.
OVERCOMING NATURE
I’m glad my grandfather Kadmos named this place sacred, I’m glad he keeps it clean. I myself planted it all round with vines
—Dionysus in Euripides' Bakkhai (translated by Anne Carson)
There are some films that come back to me on sleepless nights. Govindan Aravindan’s Chidambaram (1985) is one of them. It keeps me awake because it questions my ideas of right and wrong. It’s a very simple film, yet it centers around nothing less than the complexities of power, love, and nature. This treasure of Malayalam cinema, beautifully shot and set in the high ranges of the Western Ghats, reveals its plot like a moralistic fairy tale.
Chidambaram focuses on three men and a woman. One man, Muniyandi, is a worker, a powerless and fearful serf at a plantation owned by the government. The next, Sankaran, is an intellectual, a sophisticated alcoholic who reluctantly works as the superintendent at the farm. The third is a field supervisor, Jacob, a macho achiever who makes the rounds at the plantation on a motorbike, pressuring the workers and lusting after their wives. When Muniyandi gets married, he and his new wife, Sivakami, move to the plantation. The other two men fall for her, which ultimately leads to Muniyandi’s suicide, Sivakami’s probable death, and an existentialist crisis for Sankaran who, in contrast to the achiever, has moral scruples.
There is a huge garden somewhere on this plantation. It’s one of the most eye-catching gardens in the history of cinema. It contains mostly roses, but also dahlias and a stunning sea of scarlet sage, reaching for the sky like the arrogance of human cultivation itself. Elsewhere on the premises, a majestic shrub of bougainvillea embellishes the farm with its overwhelming inflorescence. Some gardens are no gardens. They are reliquaries of power. They are seductive liars establishing hierarchies. Traps of the ruling gods, if you like. There are those who merely look at those gardens in awe and those who own them. Their scents are fabricated ignes fatui, their colors just a filter placed on the grey emptiness of life. I admit, at times cinema has been such a garden to me. But Chidambaram is not concerned with cinema. The film wonders why we fall for these deceptive gardens stuffed with hybrid roses and grass grown with chemical fertilizers, grass so green that we can see the poison. And still we are drawn to them, accepting them as substitutes for nature. Here we are, right at the core of Aravindan’s recurring exploration of the relationship between humankind and what we call nature.
Sivakami touches those perfectly cultivated flowers like a moth drawn to light. She falls for the plants as she falls for the sophisticated Sankaran who, in contrast to her, only watches the flower with binoculars from a distance. She falls for power, the men cultivate it. Yet is “falling” really so passive an action as the verb makes it sound? The bougainvillea in the film is placed right behind a door, and whenever it opens, flowers fill the screen with vibrant colors. It looks like the entrance into another world. The question the film asks is not why Sivakami, whose scenes are accompanied by entrancing Tevaram hymnal songs, is overwhelmed by those plants. The question is who planted them, and for what purpose. Maybe that is what Aravindan meant when he once declared, “I have this reverence for nature, and that's why in the film I criticized the very thought of a hybrid rose garden.”
The bougainvillea is a deceitful ornamental flower. Originating from South America, most species grown in the rest of the world are crossbreeds or bud variations of its three foundation stocks. Some of its leaves look like petals. Its bracts look like the thin paper we write our love letters on before we carry them through the rain and lose everything we felt. It is also thorny, so it’s very likely you will get hurt if you get as close to it as Sivakami. Although it looks like the ideal image for the label of a perfume bottle, the flowers have no fragrance at all.
Even the origin of the name "bougainvillea" is related to mendacity. The plant is said to have been discovered by Jeanne Baret, a French herbalist, in the mid-18th century. Baret was the partner of Philibert Commerson, the official botanist accompanying Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville on his successful attempt to circumnavigate the world (and his less successful attempt to find the hypothetical continent Terra Australis). Since women were not allowed on board, Baret traveled disguised as a man. When her true identity was revealed, she was in danger of being hanged. Thus, Commerson named the plant discovered by his partner after the admiral to gain his protection. As we can see, our awareness of power and the way it shapes our reasoning is not so different between French explorers in the 18th century, at a plantation in India in the second half of the 20th century, and in neoliberal societies nowadays.
At one point in Chidambaram, Sankaran leafs through a book. He suffers because he hasn’t been able to resist temptation. He couldn’t deny the power he had over Sivakami and now, crushed, he is searching for answers. Although his books don’t save him from his guilt there is a hint to be found between the pages leading him to the spiritual experience he will have at the end of the film. Aravindan, who studied botany and surely didn’t only place flowers in his films because of their pleasing appearance, lingers just long enough on its cover so that we can read its title: Morality and the Inner Life: A Study in Plato’s “Gorgias” by İlham Dilman. The chapter he’s reading, “Callicles on Morality and Nature,” deals with the concept of natural morality. Similar to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the basic idea is that there are weaker and stronger elements in nature, and the stronger elements can’t help but dominate the weaker ones (and even find virtue in it).
The question Dilman asks is whether we should give into these instincts or if our true virtue lies in overcoming them. As these philosophical thoughts are related to botany via evolution, it’s easy to understand why Aravindan was drawn to them. However, he gives them a new spin by questioning whether the nature on which we base our laws and behavior exists at all. How can we justify our actions by natural law when we don’t even know what nature is? Inequality between social classes or men and women is as constructed and cultivated as the hybrid flower gardens. Let me ask again, who planted this bougainvillea?
Chidambaram stages a battle between two of the central deities of Hinduism, Prakriti (in this case, nature) and Purusha (men). The cosmic material at the root of all beings and men’s ability to govern life and reality merge. However, we must be careful not to confuse them. There is cruelty performed under the name of Prakriti which is actually an invention of Purusha. Aravindan carefully constructs every frame in Chidambaram to show this: humans frame nature instead of the other way around. Doors, windows, binoculars, hedge arches, avenues, and even Sankaran’s photography all create an image of nature that confuses man-made artifice with the natural world.
The bougainvillea is not indigenous to India; it didn’t just spring from the earth. The same is true for most of the so-called natural world, which we desperately need to protect today. Aravindan dares to ask whether we have to overcome our concepts of nature in order to return to it.
Thank you to Arindam Sen.
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees, or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.