Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who has the reputation of being Satyajit Ray's spiritual heir, is the second Indian film maker after Satyajit Ray to receive the French honour "Commandeur des Arts et Lettres". His award winning Nizhalkuthu (French title: Le serviteur de Kali - Kali's devotee, 2002) was released recently in France. It was coproduced by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Joel Farges, a French author, filmmaker, producer and critic of Indian cinema. The reviewers have been unanimous in acclaiming the universal appeal of this superbly told Indian hangman's tale. Capital punishment was abolished in France in 1981, sixteen years after Britain. However, it was only in 1990 that British authors Sydney Dernley and David Newman published The Hangman's Tale: Memoirs of a Public Executioner. The fact that thirty-eight American states still continue to practise death penalty is a matter of debate in France. Naturally, an Indian perspective on the question rpesonates well with the French audience. The struggle between life drive and death drive is yet another aspect of the film that endears it to them, accustomed as they are to the treatment of this theme by Georges Bataille.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan's film is set in the pre-independence era, in the princely state of Travancore in the 1940s. By tradition, the Maharaja patronized the family of the hangman by giving him a piece of land, an annual income and some reward after each execution. The executioner lived in the outskirts of the village so as to avoid contact with other subjects. In this case, in Nagercoil, a district of Tamil Nadu close to Kerala. Hence most of the dialogue in the film is in Tamil. The actual location in which the film was shot is the village of Pottakulam in the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu.

When the film starts, the protagonist Kaliyappan (admirably interpreted by Oduvil Unnikrishnan) is a prey to guilt and remorse having executed an innocent man years ago. His wife Maragatham (Sukumari) is caring and supportive. The obscure little house is illuminated by the bright smile of Kaliyappan's second daughter Mallika (Reeja). His elder daughter Madhavi has quit the family after marriage and comes only for brief visits. His son Muthu (Sunil), who is to take over the family profession, is a Congress militant, participates in Gandhi's swadeshi movement and is rumoured to be campaigning against capital punishment.

Kaliyappan is eking out a living by trying to soothe the pain of the villagers or by exorcising the evil spirits that take possession of young women. In order to do this, day-by-day he burns into ashes a piece of rope from the previous hanging. The hangman's rope, which is woven by the prison's inmates, seems to acquire magical powers from Goddess Kali whom the executioner worships with ardour. Then comes the royal messenger to order him to perform the dreadful task once more. Kaliyappan tries to shirk from his duty by citing illness. But the royal messenger would have none of it.

The executioner's preparation for the D-day seems worse than the culprit's. By day, he takes endless ritual baths in cold water while praying to Kali. By night, he drinks hot alcoholic beverages at the local toddy shop to quell his troubled conscience. His schizophrenia could not be more explicit. On the eve of the hanging, things get worse. Executions take place early in the morning and in order to ward off sleep, the hangman, who is accompanied by his son, asks the wardens to tell him a story. One of the stories proposed is that of Nandanar, an untouchable devotee of Shiva for whose sake the Nandi (bull) in Chidambaram temple shifted its place. But Kaliyappan wants a more interesting story. It is then that one of the wardens (remarkably performed by Nedumudi Venu) narrates the story of two innocent lovers and the rape of the young girl by her brother-in-law. "Stop!" screams the executioner, who, in a state of delirious fever, drunkenness and fear, has projected the story in the context of his own family and confused facts with fiction. He cannot bear the idea of him in the shoes of the father who punishes his son-in-law and thus condemns his surviving daughter to widowhood. Kaliyappan dies leaving his son to carry out the unfinished task. By submitting to the force of custom, the rebellious son is condemned to give up his revolutionary ideas and belong.

The genesis of the film can be traced back to a sentence in a novella by Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, "I kept watch over death" that Adoor Gopakrishnan had read. Later he read the interview by Indian's last hangman in the Malayala Manorama and used it as a source for his script. The film also continues the work that Adoor Gopalakrishnan started in Mathilukal (1989) about prison life. Though the director draws on his memories of Travancore in the 1940s, his purpose is not to foreground history. Imperialism and nationalism serve only as backdrops. Adoor Gopalakrishnan's film, despite its minimalist approach, functions at several levels. At the surface level, it is a philosophic tale about the meaning of crime and punishment as the intermittent conversations between two passing subjects reveal. At a psychological level, it is about projection, introjection and identification, processes that are also at work in the Indian aesthetics of rasa, which here transform the hangman into a victim. At another level, it is an ethnographic record of Dravidian puberty rituals. Mythology, both Indian and western, is embedded in the film. The young man Mallika falls in love with is a flute player like Krishna. Mallika, like Philomene, is raped by her brother-in-law. But most importantly, Nizhalkuthu is a metanarrative story about Indian cinema. The word "nizhalpadam" is used in Tamil to refer to photography. Nizhalkuthu traces the roots of Indian cinema to its traditional performing arts in which orality and improvisation played a significant role. The plot line of the substory is reminiscent of Indian commercial cinema's formula movie, which promotes escapism by using the "Great Indian Rape Trick", to quote Arundhati Roy, while parallel cinema has to face the gruesome reality of lack of support. Catering to consumers' attention span has dealt a blow to creative art. Like justice, cinema is the story of the struggle between light and darkness, hope and despair.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan's subtle humour sustains the interest of the audience in this slow paced movie. Thus the royal messenger wearing pants hesitates to cross a small canal and has to be carried by two peasants on their shoulders. The prince usually washes his conscience by sending a letter of pardon once the execution has been carried out. The question of who bears the responsibility for the loss of life is a conundrum in a society that believes in Karma. Thus the executioner is only an instrument in the hands of destiny. The miracle cures that he effects with the rope bear witness to this. Kaliyappan himself wonders how the accessory that ends one life could paradoxically save another. The noose is an obvious symbol of the passing of time, the grip of Yama. Somehow, it has to be connected with the umbilical cord, as Kaliyappan keeps praying to the dark mother, Kali. The rather imposing though benign figure of Maragatham in the film seems to be a human double for the divine Kali.

While death and darkness permeate the tale as in the last scene, life asserts its rights now and then. The fresh flowers that Mallika plucks are a symbolic illustration of this. Adoor Gopalakrishnan uses the classical code of suggestion to forebode danger. The lotus pond is an emblem of paradise. But the crane that flaps its wings and perturbs the beauty and silence of the scene is like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Ravi Varma and Sunny Joseph, the film's cinematographers, have come up with some close ups and freeze frames that remind us of the colour schemes and postures of the Kilimanoor school of art. Music by Ilaya Raja is a character in the film as the director himself has admitted. Moreover, there is a dialogue between sound and silence in the film that befits its theme and which is signified by the "undulating foliage, trembling flowers and whispering winds." The coexistence of the natural and the supernatural doubtless contributes to the movie's out-of-the-ordinary quality.

Nizhalkuthu is also a film about sexuality and the body. While society represses budding female sexuality (Mallika is not allowed to go to school after she comes of age), it does not seem to actively control violent male desire that wrecks havoc. The fuzzy borderline that separates love from lust resembles that between life and death. The bare shoulders of Maragatham and the naked torso of Kaliyappan show how bodies are freed from the Other's gaze only when their sexual power dwindles.

Shadow Kill, like mute pain, is more tragic and devastating than it looks. The filigreed and autobiographical element of the narrative cannot be ignored. Adoor Gopalakrishnan comes from a family of Kathakali patrons. He started acting at the age of eight. In a way, he has followed family tradition. Unlike Adoor Gopalakrishnan's first movie, Swayamvaram (One's Own Choice, 1972), which celebrates the freedom of choice, Nizhalkuthu tells the story of a failure, both the father's and the son's. The powerlessness of the society and the individual is what haunts the spectator when the movie ends.