I V Sasi
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
Achievements
MT Saju, October 25, 2017: The Times of India
Born on March 28, 1948, in Kerala's Kozhikode, Sasi began his career as an art director. His first movie `Ulsavam' in 1975, which dealt with water scarcity in a village after the construction of a dam, evoked tremendous response.
Veteran Malayalam director I V Sasi was best known for his films ` Avalude Ravukal' and `Devasuram'.
In 1978, `Avalude Ravukal' portrayed the life of a teenage sex-worker. The movie handled sex in a liberal way .The male-gaze saw it as a softporn movie, but after television repeatedly telecast the movie, it was accepted as a “product of substance“.
Sasi directed more than 150 movies, and a majority of them clocked more than 100 days. For many actors, he was a great friend. “My friend for 45 years IV Sasi is no more. The industry and I mourn a great technician,“ Kamal Haasan tweeted.
‘The man who steamed up Malayalam cinema’
Malini Nair | The man who steamed up Malayalam movies |Oct 29 2017 : The Times of India (Delhi)
When Hindi cinema was still relying on kissing flowers to show sex, director IV Sasi, who passed away recently, pushed boundaries with his bold and beautiful heroine
It was a laughably clean image by millennial standards: a lovely young woman in a white, man's shirt stands examining a couple of inches of bare thigh. The shirt's long and loose and for all the sexiness in the blackand-white film poster, the woman could be checking an insect bite.
IV Sasi's landmark film Avalude Ravukal/ Her Nights had, however, sent entire generations of men, in Kerala and elsewhere, into delirious excitement. Remember this was 1978, flowers were still doing proxy kissing and thunder and lightning still stood in for sex. The power of suggestion was the preferred mode till the film, with the pan-India title of Her Nights, broke the mould.
Sasi, 69, who passed away earlier this week, did the unthinkable -he made a film that was emphatically and explicitly sex-centric. His heroine, the stunningly beautiful Seema who he later married, played Raji, a prostitute with breezy confidence and self-awareness.
She looked men in the eye when she did business very matter-of-factly to feed a family, and got to speak some intelligent and often blunt lines (“My body has a thousand claimants but yours is the bed I prefer“).
Avalude Ravukal/ Her Nights became a landmark film in many ways.It came to define, unfairly as many will say , Malayalam cinema as a hub for soft pornography . Ramu Kariat's Chemeen may have been the first film from Kerala to hit the festival circuit but it was Avalude Ravukal/ Her Nights that brought it widespread fame and notoriety .
The dubbed version in Hindi did roaring business in the north. This was a time when Hindi films with erotic content had to pretend to improve general knowledge with names like Gupt Gyan and Gupt Shastra. (The exception was BR Ishara's Chetna made in 1970 which told the tragic story of a sex worker's doomed love. It too had a scandalous poster framed by two bare female legs.) Delhiites, now in their 50s, still remember the city plastered with the iconic Her Nights poster, which created a rare buzz in morning shows. It also spawned a big market for similar fare. From then on, the words “Malayalam film“ would always carry a virtual nudge and a wink.
“The film opened up a niche market for a certain kind of movie shown in seedy theatres. But Avalude Ravukal/ Her Nights went beyond titillating, it was a realistic, sensual film,“ says Malayalam cinema scholar CS Venkiteswaran.
The palpitation-inducing shirt scene, which came to define the film, lasted for a clumsy 11 minutes and has been helpfully clipped and loaded online by legions of fans. All it shows is Seema asking a man for something to change into from her wet clothes.A single naked arm peeps out of the bathroom door as she reaches for his shirt. That, some shots of wet patches on the shirt as she wears it and the historical bare thigh examination -kid stuff today -is all it took for the man to break into a sweat, lip trembling.
The first Malayalam film to be certified Adult, Avalude Ravukal/ Her Nights turned out to be an unprecedented success. A fan who saw the film half a dozen times this was mustwatch rite of passage for teens those days says its candid approach came as a delightful shocker to an otherwise sexually repressed society .
“Till then directors covertly fed into the Malayalee male fantasy with voyeuristic shots of women mopping the floor in fitted blouses. This straight approach startled the patriarchy because it showed a woman who was doing what she was doing,“ says a fan.
The film was way ahead of its time.The heroine even gets to marry her lover, the happy ending allowed to few “fallen“ women in movies those days -most had to kill themselves or take to ascetism in repentance.
“Nobody would make a film like this today . No director or actor would have the guts to repeat this film. I would say we have become less pro gressive in our filmmaking today ,“ says Joby Varghese, a short film director.
By modern standards of feminist discourse, the film could be criticised. The words thettu (sinmistake) and cheeta (spoilt) were often used by both the heroine and others to describe her. And when redemption arrives by way of marriage in the end, it is described as forgiveness which is also available to kallan (thief) and kolapathaki (murderer). And there is no denying it, in many places the film still dawdled exploitatively on the swell of the calf and the torso.
Sasi went on to make many more films, critically acclaimed mainstream ones that established Mammooty and Mohanlal as stars. But if there was one film in his oeuvre that changed the course of filmmaking in Kerala it was this.
