I kept noticing these artificial, awkward smiles in Raja Karuppasamy’s Modha Rathiri. Watch Muthu’s (Anishma) smiles at Marudhu (Rishikanth), even though we know she would rather be anywhere else but with him. Watch in-laws smile at each other in ways that suggest neither affection nor happiness. In this film, people smile because they are supposed to. In this film, people have been trained to suppress what they want; instead they walk around performing and trying to fit into roles enforced on them by society. Isn’t marriage the grandest performance of them all? You stand where you are told, wear what you are given, say what you must, and smile when somebody points a camera at you.

What a delightful idea, then, to make a debut film where the protagonists of a marriage, the bride and the groom, refuse to play their roles as they are supposed to. Isn’t that why that image of the bride and groom, hiding out in the darkness like outcasts, is so memorable? It’s fascinating, almost hilarious, to see how the whole machinery gets thrown into chaos when these two refuse to play their roles. You’ve got men and women across age groups panicking, screaming, yelling, spying… Drunk men picking fights, relatives carrying quiet resentments, caste anxieties, sexual expectations, a priest who harbous serious reservations about the institution of marriage, and even a cot that seems to have its own story (quite fitting that the first-night cot should find itself broken even before delivery)… Modha Rathiri is so full of life everywhere you look.

It’s the kind of film where it feels wrong to call the supporting characters “supporting characters”. So many films are full of people, but without ever managing to create individual identities among them. In Modha Rathiri, the people are all so memorable. An egotistical drunk uncle who demands respect. A young woman who’s got the eyes for a man outside her caste. Marudhu’s supportive uncle, who can tolerate any insult, except that which is directed at Marudhu. A casteist man who keeps asking for forgiveness. A homemaker woman who was once a long jump athlete. I could go on and on. People aren’t filling up frames here because you know, it’s supposed to be a ‘marriage film’. Everyone here breathes and moves.

The language is so wonderfully native, as is the humour (soplaangi!) and the faces and spaces have the messiness of lived experience. Yet, the craft shows a lot of control. I remember that stylised transition from Marudhu looking at his wedding-white-shirt to suddenly finding himself on stage wearing it. That’s how quickly resistance is broken by systems. Look at the montages through which romance and memory are communicated. Look at those brief shots of the well that feel so powerful. For a debut filmmaker, there’s remarkable control exerted over what ought to be an uncomfortably chaotic environment.

And that’s because director Raja Karuppasamy seems to have clear objectives around his portrayal of men and women. The men are mostly insufferable. They drink. They fight. They control. They are mostly incompetent too. There’s a man who says, “You know I can’t ride a gear-bike”, and the women laugh at him. But Modha Rathiri reveals something interesting about these men. They are all performing too. Bagavathy Perumal’s character, for instance, seems besotted with the idea of becoming a man everyone will respect. He is performing love towards his brother, even though the very system he champions might have well killed him. Modha Rathiri shows men like him trying to play pre-assigned roles: Provide. Protect. Go to Dubai and mourn alone if you have to. Above all, never seem inadequate in front of other men.

It’s probably why I wished the film were kinder to Nithish (Raja Karuppasamy), since he’s never able to perform his role. Is the film able to create jokes at his expense? Yes. And yet, for a film with affection for young victims of patriarchy and prescribed roles, there’s something brutal about how he’s treated at the end, particularly as he arrives topless, humiliated, beaten.

The women, meanwhile, keep being reprogrammed and enslaved to work as agents of the system. The way a woman talks about Marudhu’s sexual prowess… you’d think it’s a man talking through her. There is a lovely, sad moment involving a woman who once loved high jump but never really got to pursue it. When her daughter asks her why she never thought of her athlete dreams after marriage, you can see her body almost glitching, like her system quickly rebooting. She takes a moment, and then quickly says, “Poi velaya paaru.” These women, it seems, have become frighteningly good at hiding themselves. Muthu, fascinatingly, hasn’t… yet.

That’s what makes Anishma Anilkumar’s performance so affecting. So much of Muthu exists in the distance between the performance on her face and the emotion within. She barely, if ever, is allowed to talk. Even when she talks, it’s in whispers and high-pitched squeals for help. Even with Marudhu, whenever she tries to talk, he asks her to remain quiet. And quickly, she shuts up. It’s frustrating to watch because you see she has a lot to say but her society has persuaded her not to. Perhaps for this reason, I thought of Anna Ben in Kottukkaali. Not because these films or women are identical, but because Muthu too seems surrounded by people who casually suffocate her because that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Two moments in the film capture her most authentic expression. One, when she suddenly lets go and dances. Not some graceful ‘Sangeet’ dance intended to charm visitors, but a kind of primal, fearsome kuthu dance that momentarily brings her relief. And then, later, when she screams… And how she screams. It feels like the release of something that has been stored for years. When you have been suffocated for so many years, ordinary language feels no longer sufficient. There’s another visceral moment involving Muthu (and the priest played by Chetan). This priest has strong opinions about society, marriage, love… but then, just as he gets ready to rebuke her, Muthusimply looks at him, this dark angel of sadness and grief. He sees her and shuts up. Priests and gods better shush in the presence of such suffering.

That’s why, for me, one of the loveliest things about Modha Rathiri is how it treats Muthu’s grief in the aftermath of her break-up. It would have been so easy to turn it into a joke simply because her boyfriend borders on the ridiculous and the comical. The film does encourage us to laugh at him, as I’d said, but it never laughs at Muthu’s loss. That’s why through the second half, we only see a devastated Muthu, quiet and brooding. I liked that the film doesn’t treat Marudhu’s loss as more profound, even though you could totally understand if it did.

Rishikanth is enormously likeable as Marudhu, and one of my favourite moments comes when he finally begins talking about his past to the priest (in the presence of Muthu). At one point, words seem to escape him and his hands begin moving as though they have decided to tell the story themselves. The relationship may have ended years ago; the grief, it seems, is still alive in his body. I also liked that we never see the woman Marudhu loved. We don’t have to. She exists in the film as she does to Marudhu: in his mind, as a memory. Underneath all this heaviness and complexity, there’s the simple and tender idea of two wounded people being comfortable in each other’s presence, simply because they both recognise wounds in each other.

And yet, Modha Rathiri has the restraint not to treat this as a magical relationship that ought to be celebrated right away. There’s still work to be done, you see. And that’s why Marudhu’s quietness (acknowledging what Muthu says only in non-verbal language) at the end is so special. The same Marudhu, who shut Muthu up earlier, has learned by the end to let her speak. I guess the uncomfortable irony here is also the suggestion that Muthu’s safety and security still requires the presence of a man, the blanket of the marriage institution. Perhaps it’s the film trying to say that sometimes, even rebellion has to exist within a system.

I know I make Modha Rathiri seem like a mirthless film, but it really isn’t. In fact, it’s amazing that Raja Karuppasamy carries all of this social and emotional commentary under the deceptive structure of a wedding-chaos-comedy. This film shows such mastery of movement between seriousness and comedy, such tonal control. And how lovely that in this film, ‘modha rathiri’ (‘first night’) really does bring Marudhu and Muthu closer, except not in the way society has prescribed. For such reasons, I think it’s one of the best directorial debuts in a while. As I said at the beginning, it’s a film full of fake smiles, but when it ends, you see Marudhu and Muthu smiling once again, breaking into laughter. Except, this time, for the first time, they both mean it.