Actor-writer Murali Gopy is one of the few writers in the country who can play with multiple narratives with a conjurer's cheekiness. He has pioneered what has been called the 'water flow' structure in his scripts. Individual story streams originate from obscure points, they pass along narrow channels, each of them seemingly oblivious of the flow of others, some merge at certain points, get bigger, meets other streams at other points, gets even bigger, meets more flows until each of these streams that began independent of each other come together in one big glorious whole.
'Left Right Left' (2013), his second film as a writer, saw his unique art polished to near perfection. As part of Onmanorama's exclusive 'decoding a scene' series, Murali Gopy elaborates on the engineering of a moment when two such story streams come together.
The social environment
“The movie discusses the sociopolitical and emotional variations of colour red. So obviously the major part of the movie deals with the representation of the colour in the Communist-Marxist milieu,” said Gopy.
Gopy leaves no chances and creates some characters and incidents to mock at the present condition of the society.
“There is a particular scene in the movie which showcases an inevitably ideological conversation -- a dialogue rather between two of the major characters. The first character is Kaitheri Sahadevan (Hareesh Peradi) whose personality has been moulded by a bitter childhood replete with poverty, social unrest and the political murders of near ones. It has all made him into an iron-fisted Stalinist.”
“Striking a dialogue with the Stalinist is the leftist humanist Roy Joseph (Murali Gopy) who has his share of strong memories and experiences to say what he is saying. So the entire scene acts as an allegorical platform for the dialogue that ensues between the Stalinist and the leftist humanist.
Neither this scene nor the film is about right or wrong and is neither about any heroes or villains. It is about people, their opinions, their convictions, their upbringing, their experiences which in turn become their attitude and outlook,” he added.
The setting
With hard-hitting moments, candid lines, brilliant visuals and impressive performances, the film is a visual treat. (Murali credits fimmaker Arun Kumar Aravind for the brilliant manner in which he has translated his writerly vision on to the screen.)
Talking about that, he said, “Since the scene, the character dynamics and the dialogues are a bit theoretical, I had conceived this to be happening in a kind of buffer zone where no character has an upper hand. I had imagined a vast field of dry grass and wind with no trees or any kind of man-made structures that could function as a canopy or shade to any of these characters.”
“In this scene a lone shop is seem amid that wide expanse by the forlorn road that leads to the construction site of a hospital that Kaitheri Sahadevan is saying that he is building for his people. The man who runs the soda shop is the very subject of Communist Marxist ideology i.e. the proletarian and inadvertently he functions as a human prop to the theoretical dialogue that happens in his vicinity without his knowledge. That is one angle from which you can watch this scene," he said.
The visualisation
In the movie, it might be hard to accept any resemblance to living people in some instances. And Gopy credits it to the history.
“There is a top shot showing Roy walking on to the road and standing in the way of Sahadevan's car convoy. While writing this scene, I specifically had in mind the visual of an absolute defiance from China that happened way back in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests. The visual was that of an unknown youngster who later came to be known as 'The Tank Man'. That image of the youth standing in front of a line of tanks and doing his best to halt the advance of Chinese army to the very spot where protesters were gathering became famous.”
“This man left a void in my heart because he was not heard of after that. What happened to him, no one knows. While writing this scene, the visual of this man standing in front of the tanks came to my mind again and again and found a reference itself in the scene,” he concluded.
