I saw a movie the other day called Mundasupatti, I’m sure you’ve heard of it if you’re in Tamil Nadu. It was funny, they took a simple superstition which is around and made a fun movie out of it. It was a period film, exploring the 70’s of rural India. I was instantly reminded of swades, a great hindi film which again explores the development gap between cities and villages, it goes a bit further to compare development as seen by an Indian NASA engineer and his old house-hold nanny’s village.
While Swades was a serious film about self empowerment and braking society’s rules about casteism and encouraging education, Mundasupatti is just a funny movie about how stupid, people are.
The movie revolves around a village after which the film is named, the people in the village believe that taking a photograph causes people to get sick and die. The movie did a faithful representation of the rural India, with its proud people and crazy traditions which make no sense. People of Mundasupatti worship an asteroid (very small) which happened to land when the village was being attacked by bandits, seeing the asteroid the bandits ran and the people made it a god.
This basically is a love story, a photographer is hired to take a picture of a dead village elder, for the people to remember him by. But he sees a girl he likes in that household and decides to sticks around. He learns that the girl is already set to marry someone and her parents made her quit school for that, she’s also the grand daughter of the dead village elder. The photographer and his assistant somehow delay her wedding and anger the village in the process. They are asked to dig a well as punishment, the photographer goes through lot of funny moments in and around the village during this time. He is also allowed to stay in the village elder’s place. People believe that a vampire will attack if you go to the school building, so the only school in the village is deserted and beside the burial grounds.
They provide authenticity by covering a lot of basics,
Very old man having a very young wife
People make 17 year olds quit school to get them married
Public defecation
A guy who is desperate to be in movies and acts elitist when he gets a shitty role in a shitty movie.
People using motorcycles which a ten year old can outrun
People burying the post box believing that to be some satanic symbol or something
Giving milk to dying elders so that they’ll choke and die sooner
Believing any one with a saffron robe to be a man of god
Breaking thief’s arms for suspicion of stealing
A girl who sits silently on her wedding when she doesn’t love the groom a bit
Girl gets slapped when she tells her father she doesn’t like the groom they have selected for her.
Parents give away the girl to be married to the guy whom the priest recommends as their god’s will.
In any case, the movie had its moments and is worth a watch for relevant people, I’m sure it won’t make sense to anybody outside of Tamil Nadu or even someone who is from the city.
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