*குடும்ப குத்து விளக்கு Romanisation: Kudumba Kuthuvilakku
Translation: While it literally refers to the lamp used for prayer purposes, it is also used to refer a pure and holy woman, who is the foundation of her family (a.k.a. the chaste wife or the godly mother).
[MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD]
Super Deluxe is, hands down, the most feminist Indian film to have been made. Ever. Trust me on this.
An adulterous wife (Vaembu - left) who literally kills her lover with her libido, a father (Shilpa - centre) who disappears for seven and a half years to come back as a gorgeous woman, and last but definitely not least, the divine mother (Leela - right) who turns out to be the star of her son's virgin 3D porn experience.
If the nuclear brown family unit is predicated on the suppression, repression and oppression of the wife and mother's body, it's safe to say that Super Deluxe uproots the entirety of brown society by redefining brown female sexuality. Here's the big middle finger you were hoping for, Spivak!
Consent
Unarguably, the only thing that should matter when it comes to sex is consent (and age of course, don't have sex with minors cc: Oldboy). Yet, this fundamental concept is often buried under the pedestal that brown society likes to put its women on. The obsession with futile social constructs like chastity and virginity causes consent to be overlooked, lost and misinterpreted.
Consent applies to everyone. Not just chaste wives, innocent virgins and divine mothers.
Hence, my bold claim that Super Deluxe is the most feminist Indian film to ever be made.
Because what better way to explore the concept of consent than through the figures of an adulterous wife (whose body count is too high to warrant a mention on the silver screen) and a transwoman, navigating the prickly path of fatherhood?
In Super Deluxe, the embodiment of rape energy is not the dark, brooding villain who can be knocked out in one fell swoop by the hero, but the almost cartoon-ish police officer, Berlin. This villain's superpower is his authority as a police officer and his go-to weapon is emotional manipulation, served with a side of never-ending insidious cackles.
Berlin falls back on every brown person's favourite concepts (chastity, virginity and honour [aka "Log Kya Kahenge" -Trans:"What will people say"]) to obtain his singular goal: sexual gratification.
As the woes of a transwoman in India would go, Shilpa is beaten and taken into the police station for hanging out with her own son - under the accusations of being a pedophile and a pervert. Just as her name is cleared after verification that Raasu Kutti is indeed her son, our good man Berlin swoops in. Using the situation to his favour, Berlin manipulates Shilpa into performing a non-consensual act of fellatio for him in his own workplace.
In a similar vein, Vaembu and her husband's quest to hide her lover's dead body is busted by our favourite police officer. His lovely proposal to Vaembu? Divorce your husband and be my mistress, or else I'll blow this issue up such that at least 2 members of your family commit suicide from shame.
Though only one of his two ungentlemanly conquests bears fruit, in both instances, the fear, anguish and trauma that both women feel is conveyed deeply and sharply. The combination of cinematic techniques, stellar acting and Berlin's never-ending cackles create a suffocating atmosphere of terror - presenting the spectator with a harrowing 4D experience of rape anxiety.
Useless concepts like chastity and virginity attempt to black and white-ify the grey area that is sex. Through using the morally ambiguous figure of Vaembu (who actually f*cked a man to death, and then attempted to hide said man's body with her husband as an accomplice) and the enigmatic figure of Shilpa - a transwoman trying her best to be a good dad - Super Deluxe drives home the crucial point that consent applies to everyone, regardless of gender, sexuality or morality.
Gender roles, say what?
The real hero of Super Deluxe, Shilpa's son, alias Raasu Kutti, is no doubt the most endearing character of the whole film.
The culmination of a 7.5 year long wait, Raasu Kutti observes his beautiful father for a good few moments before breaking out into a huge grin. As they walk through the dusty town hand-in-hand, Raasu Kutti peppers his dad with innocent, non-judgemental questions about her transition that Shilpa answers with both love and honesty.
If a parallel were to be drawn between Shilpa/Raasu Kutti and the film/its child-like audience, it almost feels like this beautiful sequence breaks down the largely obscure concept of transgender-hood for its viewers. In the process, the rigid gender roles that eclipse transgenderness are gently unveiled.
Regardless, the austerity of gendered gossip in brown society would wear down even the toughest of souls, and they send Shilpa looking for an escape back to Bombay. Shilpa is dehumanised for her transgression of gender roles; people refuse to address her as "she" or "he", instead choosing to use the pronoun "it" - a harsh punishment indeed for non-conformity.
Just when Shilpa thinks her day cannot get any worse, Raasu Kutti goes missing, sending her on a wild goose chase throughout the town. As she returns home in shambles, she finds him sitting in their living room, looking unpeturbed.
Raasu Kutti shoves off his father's relieved kisses, locks himself in the bathroom and launches into a heart-wrenching tirade: "Everybody is mocking you, so you wanted to run away. But mom and I accept you just the way you are! Be a man or be a woman, just be with us. Damn it!"
If language is one medium through which gender roles are reinforced, it is the same medium through which Super Deluxe dismantles them. Coupled with the delivery of what might be the best dialogue to ever have been uttered in Kollywood history, the term "Appa" loses its gravitas as a marker of patriarchy, instead transforming into a beautiful signifier of father-son love, and nothing else.
The maternal body
Everyone watches porn. (If you say you don't, then you're lying.)
But to sit down with your friends to watch your first 3D porno film, only to find out that your mom is the star of the show must really be quite the experience.
Freud must really be having a field day in his grave.
If one were to consider the maternal body through psychonalytic lens, it really is the site where all the male sexual energy in the family - be it from the son or father - is concentrated. In layman terms, the Oedipal complex would be: the son wants to f*ck his mom, but can't because his dad is cockblocking him. So this primal sexual desire morphs into a desire to kill the father that has to be repressed because the father is stronger and bigger. The son carries on this messed up cycle into his own marriage, and so on.
But life is seldom that black and white. In Super Deluxe, Leela's foray into porn makes her own son come after her with a knife (which he slips on and ends up stabbing himself), and sends her husband, Arputham, into sainthood after a failed suicide attempt.
The rest of this family's storyline follows Leela and Arputham's desperate journey to save their idiotic son from his self-inflicted stab wound.
As heaven would have it, Soori does manage to survive what would have been the world's dumbest way to die. A relieved and enigmatic Leela asks Soori if he watched her film.
"The world is okay with the people who watch porn. But it shames the actors," says Leela gently, calling out the hypocrisy of the moral dictates surrounding sex and pornography. Informing her son that it was a conscious and fully aware decision on her part, Leela tells him about another role she played, as the goddess in a film.
Leela then wraps up what must have been a hell of a day by providing a beautiful summation of the fluidity of the female body: "To the people who watched that film, I will appear as a goddess. To the people who watch this film, I will appear as a whore. But ultimately, I am Leela. No more, no less."
What is it that causes the deep fissure in the psyches of the two men in this ideal Freudian Father-Mother-Son family unit? Is it the disorientation that results from the realisation that the mother is not the property of the father and son? Is it the anger at having the private maternal body revealed to the lustful eyes of other men (and boys)?
Or is it the crushing anagnorisis that the maternal body belongs to the woman and only the woman, who is a full human in herself, independent of her son and husband?
Wrapping things up
The film is not just delightful in its content, but it is also a visual treat. Luminescent tones and shades of red and blue contrast, clash and co-exist.
A minor detail but I found the casting of the actors for the three different women particularly interesting. At the time of the casting, Samantha Akkinieni (Vaembu) had just got married to Naga Chaitanya Akkineni, the son of Telugu super star, Nagarjuna, in what was a fairytale wedding that got all of us spinning. Ramya Krishnan (Leela) just played the coolest mom to ever exist in the epic Baahubali, and Vijay Sethupathi (Shilpa) was - and still is - steadily on the rise to the ranks of being a Kollywood superstar. Considering the images that each of the actors have in real life (wife, mother, patriarch), the casting choices seem to be as tongue-in-cheek as the film itself.
All in all, at the end of the day, what Super Deluxe seems to be saying is real simple: Family is predicated on unconditional love, not the virtue of the woman.
