And God created woman

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: I V Sasi was trained to be an artist but no canvas other than cinema would have contained the energy he possessed. It was the best medium he could have ever associated with, given his flair for anything that was real, expansive and immense. Even his directorial debut, Ulsavam, a black & white film, teemed with a richness of crowd scenes: a village temple festival rendered in all its splendour.

He drew from a creative spirit that symbolised a sculptor at work, relentlessly chiselling one artistic piece after another at a frenetic pace. The timing of his entry into

Malayalam

cinema as a filmmaker would have made any other debutant faint. With stalwarts such as K S Sethumadhavan, A Vincent, J Sasikumar at one end and Bharathan, K G George, Adoor Gopalakrishnan at the other, Sasi defined his own style. His momentum, brooding over the mainstream and the parallel, was never stilled.

He was not just a popular filmmaker who sprinted from one hit-making set to another.An idol breaker, he jeered at notions of morality and questioned gender equations. The poster for the film, Avalude Raavukal, had the image of a woman flashing her thighs, daring the society to turn up and listen to the tale of a prostitute. There was a liberal artist in him, inextricably wound to a methodical filmmaker, who encapsulated human bodies and elements of nature with equal verve.

Sasi carved for himself an interesting paradox: the director who pictured intertwined bodies of man and woman lost in unbridled passion also gave us tales of innocent and unrequited love.

Woman characters in his films stood up to the men in their lives, teasing , questioning and confronting them bravely . Raji, the prostitute of Avalude Raavukal boldly asks her customer why he calls her `edii' and retorts with a `nee poda' and proceeds to snub him. “You wouldn't do anything to me, even if I called you eda; if it was your wife you would have thrashed her.“

Sasi drew heavily from his experience as an art director to finilize shots and frames. He updated his knowledge on lenses, which he deftly used while composing crowd scenes. Nobody would have dared make a period film like 1921 with a budget crossing Rs one crore in the late 80s, his contemporaries said. His movies Angadi, Adimakal Udamakal, Ee Naadu, invoked the pent-up fury and frustration of labour class offering social and political commentaries.

Towards the late 1990s, Sasi lost his magical touch inspite of his tireless attempts to reinvent.In the middle of 2000, his friends remember him alighting from a train in

Thampanoor

, alone carrying a briefcase.

Sasi was never complaining even when his films failed in theatres. He was always driven by a sense of purpose. A desire to succeed inspired him to plan multicrore projects even while his body was losing out in the battle against cancer.


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