There’s a visual fascination with assembly-lines that works exceptionally well in film: something about the repetition of mass-produced items swiftly moving down a conveyer belt creates a mesmeric pleasure that’s enhanced when the product is both banal and surreal, like blue medical latex gloves. Keralan director Mahesh Narayanan uses these images without commentary in Declaration, relying on their compulsive watchability to draw out thoughts regarding worker exploitation and immoral business practices, but in truth these sequences featuring hundreds of disembodied hand molds swiveling to their own silent dance have a stand-alone zaniness with little to do with the film’s theme of power dynamics between the sexes and classes. While the subject is strong, the execution is too labored, making Declaration a difficult sell outside festivals searching for regional Indian fare.
Reshmi (Divya Prabha) and Hareesh (Kunchacko Boban, doing double-duty as producer) have been eight months in Noida, a satellite town to New Delhi, hoping to emigrate. They’re from Kerala, which basically makes them foreigners in Uttar Pradesh, a state depicted as hostile and awash in corruption. While they impatiently wait for a visa, supposedly being arranged by shyster facilitator Mohanan (Kiran Peethambaran), they work at the Neelam Rubber Factory, she as a tester and he as a driver. The atmosphere on the factory floor is tense and Reshmi is frustrated that so many of the gloves she tests by rote on air nozzles, blowing them up to make sure they’re strong enough, are defective. She tells her supervisor Suresh (Kannan Arunachalam), and though a sympathetic guy, he’s too tied to the system to make waves, while shady factory manager Dinesh (Faisal Malik) is simply nasty, transferring Reshmi to the department where the gloves are washed.
As if Reshmi and Hareesh aren’t already treated like outsiders, their situation gets much worse when a TikTok that Hareesh made of Reshmi inflating gloves, designed as proof of her skills for the visa application, is hacked with an indistinct video of a mostly masked woman performing oral sex on an anonymous man. The couple are humiliated, the implication being that it’s Reshmi in the video, but when they file a complaint with the police, the officer shames them. A strain develops between husband and wife that’s inescapable as Hareesh begins to doubt her, his suspicions adding further unease to the toxic atmosphere in the factory.
The ambiguity surrounding Reshmi’s character is one of the film’s strongest elements, nourished by her hesitancy when in the presence of those in power and Prabha’s nuanced portrayal. We don’t quite know how to read her at first, which helps draw us into the story more when the rather over-careful, methodical storyline holds us at a distance, occasionally working against emotional involvement. Dinesh’s unpleasantness is too expected, the policeman’s vile treatment of the couple too stereotyped, but Reshmi remains intriguing, especially once we realize her moral backbone is far firmer than that of her husband’s. Indeed, she’s the one willing to stand up to the factory bosses when she discovers that used disposable gloves are being brought in and washed as if new.
It’s this atmosphere of pervasive corruption that Narayanan (Take Off) captures so well, using the hermetic, depersonalized spaces of the factory, made even more charged by the COVID masks worn by all. Every corner seems charged with uncertainty, and for Reshmi and Hareesh that sense of destabilization doesn’t end when the workday is over, given that they’re in limbo and made to feel like foreigners (being on different shifts also doesn’t help). At least in their temporary rudimentary abode she can relax in a safe space, but Hareesh’s doubts make even those crumbling four walls feel suffocating.
Visually Declaration is very much in line with low-budget indie productions, its digital sharpness unalleviated by naked bulbs and an industrial airlessness – when towards the end the scene shifts to daytime outside, it’s a relief even though the location remains a slum. Sanu John Varughese’s handheld camera has just that edge of movement, preventing the mise-en-scène from feeling too rigid, though the editing has a flatness that keeps holding the film back.
Director: Mahesh Narayanan
Screenplay: Mahesh Narayanan
Cast: Kunchacko Boban, Divya Prabha, Lovleen Misra, Kannan Arunachalam, Faisal Malik, Danish Husain, Sidharth Bhardwaj, Saifudheen, Kiran Peethambaran, Neetu Chaudhary, Dimpi Mishra, Athulya Ashadam, Riyan Renchi, Kartikey Saxena, Hareesh Kumar, Lakshmi Sharma
Producers: Shebin Backer, Kunchacko Boban, Mahesh Narayanan
Cinematography: Sanu John Varughese
Production designer: Jotish Shankar
Costume designer: Dhanya Balakrishnan
Editing: Mahesh Narayanan, Rahul Radhakrishnan
Music: Tony Rutherford
Sound: Vaisakh PV
Production companies: Kunchacko Boban Productions (India), Shebin Backer Productions (India) in association with Moving Narratives (India)
Venue: Locarno (International competition)
In Malayalam, Hindi
106 minutes
