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A delightful spoof on death

In an average mainstream film, suicide is a cliché woven into the script, mainly for melodramatic reasons.

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Shoma A. Chatterji

In an average mainstream film, suicide is a cliché woven into the script, mainly for melodramatic reasons. Often, for the female character, it is used to cater to the conventional norms of an essentially traditional and hypocritically prudish audience. For the male character, it comes from a deep sense of guilt resulting from failure, understood from the suicidal person’s perspective. Filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan turns these melodramatic ideas of suicide on their heads in his short film filled with black humour A Happy End (Sukhyantam) in Malayalam. 

The 30-minute film offers a delightful spoof on the romanticising of suicide by most suicidal victims. The Happy End Limited is a small firm that actually counsels clients not to commit suicide in exchange for a registration fee. It is a firm set up by three men of different ages and status headed by a post-graduate in psychology. The Happy End Limited is a successful business venture. 

Adoor plays around craftily with both form and content to present an interesting fable. He uses theatrical costumes, gestures and musical instruments, alongside the doorbell that chimes out loud guffaws that shock the client wanting desperately to die. He uses a completely black screen as a tactic that scares off the customer determined to die but is terrified of the dark. “I was inspired by a play written by N.K. Achary that deals with this subject. Besides, my home state Kerala has a high rate of suicide and I wanted to treat this differently, through black humour. So I focussed on all elements of technique, including the sound design done by N. Harikumar to emphasise the tragedy of death on the one hand and the delight in being alive on the other,” says Adoor. 

Three different clients walk in. The first is a sad and distraught housewife who believes that her husband does not love her anymore. She goes away convinced that if she takes care of her looks, pays greater attention to her husband, and gives him company, she would not want to end her life. Though this advice may anger feminists, it fits into the social ambience the film represents — a small town in Kerala where this company is located.

The second is an under-age boy who could not clear his medical entrance exams. His mother, whose brothers and nephews are medicos in the US, has threatened suicide if the boy did not clear his entrance exams. “How many had taken the medical entrance?” he is asked. “3,00,000” he says of which around 1,400 had cleared the exams. “So go tell your mother that one need not clear medical exams to go to the US,” says one of the three men and the sad-faced, tall boy leaves. The film also takes a jibe at the education system where only a fraction of those who appear can clear the entrance exam.

The third client is a bearded young poet, who demands the men to kill him. He wants to die because he has been betrayed by “treacherous women” and has no purpose in life. So, the two leading men play some nostalgic music for him and he gets sucked into music. This character is a metaphor for people who create their own causes for killing themselves. When a good-natured police inspector comes to enquire after complaints, the head says that he offers a different kind of counselling to those who want to die, which is a combination of theatre, some tricks and unconventional methods to make them change their minds.

Attitudes towards suicide differ in different societies and are closely linked to ideologies of death and after-life. But Adoor’s lovely film throws up a completely different picture that is entertaining, informative and enriching.

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