Judging Desire: Malayalam Cinema’s Reckoning With Voyeurism & Virtue
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Across Avihitham, Dheeran, and Vedivazhipadu, Malayalam cinema turns morality into its own subject, exposing how voyeurism, judgment, and male insecurity shape society’s gaze on intimacy and choice, writes Neelima Menon. |
ACROSS VILLAGES AND CITIES, in bedrooms and buses, the performance of morality remains the same — loud, righteous, and deeply voyeuristic. In Avihitham, Dheeran , and Vedivazhipadu, desire becomes a site of public scrutiny, revealing how easily society confuses sin with choice and judgment with justice. These films, in their distinct textures and tones, strip bare our obsession with controlling intimacy — and, in doing so, expose the fragile egos and double standards that sustain it. There’s a moment in Senna Hegde’s Avihitham (now running in theatres) that highlights the film’s uneasy gaze on morality and masculinity. The husband, accompanied by his brother, is waiting in the dark to catch his wife with her lover. In fact, it is a spectacle that the entire village seems complicit in staging, eager to witness both the collapse of a marriage and the supposed triumph of “morality.” But as the husband waits for the couple, an unexpected emotion surfaces — a reluctant admiration for the lover’s stamina. It’s a fleeting yet piercing moment that collapses the distance between voyeurism and vulnerability, exposing how easily the codes of morality blur with male insecurity. Stream the latest Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada releases, with OTTplay Premium's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. |
Hegde approaches this dicey theme with the same lightness and mirth that defined his debut feature, Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam, which revolved around a patriarch’s hold over his daughters' autonomy. Here too, he leans on the earthy authenticity of his hometown, its innocence, peculiar slang, and unvarnished rhythms, to lay bare the moral hypocrisies of a society quick to judge but slow to introspect. When a random villager first stumbles upon an illicit affair between a mill worker and a married woman, his initial reaction is one of salacious excitement — quickly followed by the moral high ground of “informing” the wronged husband. From there, it doesn’t take long for the entire village to get involved, with elders and family members rallying to protect the so-called collective virtue of the community. What’s fascinating is how Hegde positions his characters within this moral theatre — the tailor who “identifies” the woman through her body measurements, exposing an ingrained voyeurism; the father-in-law who demands an inquiry; the brother who drafts the plan; and the husband who, though visibly defeated, follows along. Yet not one of them dares to confront the woman directly. They’d rather wait for the spectacle to unfold, feeding off gossip and assumption. That’s when moral policing becomes its own form of entertainment. |
You sense a similar vicarious thrill in Devadath Shaji’s Dheeran, when a village discovers a man and a woman in a compromising position inside a bus, right in the middle of a festival. The man who first catches them reacts with outrage, choosing to summon an audience instead of quietly addressing (or even ignoring) what he’s seen. Within moments, a crowd gathers, eager to witness the unfolding scandal. What begins as shock quickly slips into mockery, as the man smirks and taunts the young woman for remaining unmarried, almost as if her single status somehow voids her of the right to intimacy. Unlike in Avihitham, there isn’t even a moral grey area here — both individuals are single and consenting adults who simply chose the wrong place for privacy. Yet the village’s reaction reveals the same voyeuristic pleasure disguised as moral righteousness, showing the same hunger to control female agency under the pretext of preserving decency. ALSO READ | Director Devadath Shaji: 'Have heroes of three generations in Dheeran' And the immediate “solution,” unsurprisingly, is to marry them off, framed as a way to protect the supposed dignity of their families, even though the couple has no desire for such a resolution. What makes the woman’s response compelling is her refusal to marry merely to save face. But having said that, she is also aware of the deep-seated hypocrisy that allows the man to walk free, untainted, while she alone would have to bear the weight of the scandal and lifelong stigma. She talks about a society that is still incapable of distinguishing between love and lust or between choice and transgression. Eventually, the discourse around her revolves entirely around “protecting” her virtue, while her own agency, feelings, and desires are never treated as questions worthy of consideration. In a moral universe constructed by men, they are simply irrelevant. In this way, the film exposes not only the performative policing of morality but also the enduring double standards that govern women’s lives in intimate and public spheres alike. |
A decade ago, Shambu Purushothaman’s Vedivazhipadu explored a very different corner of male desire, centring on three married men who hire a sex worker during a local festival to indulge in their fantasies. In the confines of an apartment, as they loosen their inhibitions with alcohol and pornography while waiting for their guest, the film exposes the quietly crumbling double standards of society. In that small space of “amorality,” the men unspool their repressed sexual desires, frustrations, and delusions — all in front of a woman whose professional presence presumably shields her from judgment. Each character carries his own fractured ego and insecurities: from fantasising about a friend’s wife to boasting about libido, they perform masculinity in ways that are simultaneously vulnerable and absurd. Yet the film’s narrative is, in many ways, effortlessly constructed because society has historically been soft on men. Imagine a gender-reversed version, a story about women indulging in their sexual desires in a similar context, and it quickly becomes unthinkable. We are conditioned to assume that a woman’s agency and desires must always operate within the strict confines of right and wrong, often tethered to a man’s approval. And even in Vedivazhipadu, the men are quick to judge the sex worker, rather than confront their own hypocrisy, entitlement, or latent misogyny. The film, in its subtle way, exposes the ease with which male desire is normalised and protected, while simultaneously highlighting the rigid moral cages women are forced to inhabit. |
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