There is a deceptive simplicity about Adoor Gopalakrishnan's new film Naalu Pennungal (Four Women). Each episode of the film is a pithy understatement – they are tales of unconsummated love that excavate the despair of women's lives. Naalu Pennungal weaves together four different episodes based on the stories of the celebrated writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai depicting the condition of women in the mid-20th century central Kerala: Oru Niyamalanghanathinte Katha (Story of an Illegal Act), Kanyaka (The Virgin), Chinnu Amma and Nithya Kanyaka (Eternal Virgin).

The film is an incisively clinical look at the condition of women from different stations of life and status in society. The low caste Kunjipennu (Padmapriya) and her lover in the first part (Oru Niyamalanganathinte Katha) despairingly assert their relationship as husband and wife before a social system that do not accord human-ness to them. The condition of the rest of the women in the other episodes is no different. If it is an aggressively exploitative patriarchal system that looms over the Kunjipennu's life, in Kanyaka, it is indifference and impotence. Here the father is incapable of protecting or empowering her, while her husband is a moron, aroused only by food and money-making. Kumari, (played by Geetu Mohandas) is left behind, bitter and despairing, but resolute in her loneliness. She asserts before her parents and the neighbours that her marriage never happened. If in Kumari’s case, the marriage is never consummated, in the case of Chinnu Amma, it is motherhood that fatefully evades her. Chinnu Amma (played by Manju Pillai) is another story of fruitless fidelity and the never-ending wait for an offspring. When an occasion presents itself to break away from it, she shirks herself out of that temptation of flesh and progeny, and decides to shut herself in the prison of being a 'virtuous' wife. The fourth episode (Nithya Kanyaka) presents an array of women in different facets: the protective mother torn between what is rightful and proper, and the exigencies of everyday life (KPAC Lalitha); the temptress and sensuous girl, nubile and inviting, fiercely possessive and assertive (Kavya Madhavan) and the eternal virgin who is fated to play the role of the sacrificing nurturer and surrogate mother to all, Kamakshi (Nandita Das). Whatever life offers to Kamakshi are snatched away from her, and she ends up living 'for the sake of' things other than her self and her body. The film ends with Kamakshi affirming as if in response to the pleading knocks at the door and directly to the audience, the possibility of women living without a male companion.

Naalu Pennungal is about non-consummation of love, or the impossibility of love, and the systemic exclusion of women from any 'transgression'. One of the recurring motifs in the film is that of closed and closing doors. Sometimes it is the woman who closes the door upon the world, more often it is the other way round.

It is the extreme minimalism in form that strikes the viewer immediately. There is no rhetoric or flamboyance of any kind – visual, aural or narrative. Composed mostly of mid-shots of a detached observer, the film resonates with a kind of energy that invites the viewer not to identify but observe, not to sloganeer but to reflect upon a certain human condition that seems to envelop the lives of women like a shroud.

Women have always been a marginal presence in Adoor films. Even when they were central to the story, they remained a magical presence or an absence that is filled in by the desires and anxieties of the male hero (Anantaram (1987)), or one whose presence is made all the more poignant by her physical absence (Mathilukal (1990)).

The most significant quality of Naalu Pennungal is that it doesn't fall into the trap of a psychological realism that vainly hopes to enter into the woman's mind and explicate its inner motives and patterns. Or, to put it crudely, Adoor doesn't pretend to make a
'feminist' movie that claims to voice the angst and anger of women but instead steadfastly remains detached from such easy temptations. It rather portrays women with deep empathy and any kind of fist-clenching and condemnation is alien to its form and treatment.

All the powerful and aggressive men in the film are totally self-centred and engrossed in themselves. The frustrated drunkard conspires against Kunjipennu to wreak revenge, and all the judges in the court jeer at their 'claim' to be husband and wife. In Kanyaka, the husband is a glutton, her father is physically debilitated and the neighbour who feigns to help is only good at spreading canards about her. In Chinnu Amma, the husband is unable to fulfill her desire for an offspring, while the crafty paramour only tries to talk her into fulfilling 'his' lust. In Nithya Kanyaka, the whole family becomes a mechanism of exploitation, turning their daughter Kamakshi into a slave for its own continuity, comfort and survival. And all the acts of rebellion on the part of women are acts of moving away from the clutches of the System – legal, familial, social and moral – and into a solitary world of one's own.

The institution of marriage and the place of woman in it are central to each narrative. In all the episodes, the family as such is never consummated, made whole, and it is always marked by a lack or an absence. It is only in the case of Kunjipennu that it is a positive and liberating possibility. But that desire of theirs is firmly crushed by society and the system. For Kumari, though she is technically married, it is not consummated through bodily union, and she has to break away from it. In the case of Chinnu Amma, despite being married and sexually active, she is unable to bear a child and attain motherhood. The only opportunity that tempts her is one that would require the denial of the family, or compromising her fidelity. Nithya Kanyaka poses both the impossibility of marriage for Kamakshi and the fragility of the marriage of her younger sister, who is married and has kids. The institution of marriage takes several equally illusory forms here and like any other ideal, always remains treacherous or elusive in reality.

These women have no access to power or control over their sexuality; all their desires are actually the obverse desires of the male society that envelopes them. And it is this marginalization of their selves and desires that Naalu Pennungal thematically frontalises for us. Formally, it is this very spirit of economy and minimalism that stands out in sharp relief. In a way, it is history at its barest. For all those who look for conclusions and closures, assertions and easy messages, the film would be an enigma.

What the film tries to do or depict is not what Thakazhi the writer was up to in his time. Even while being a 'period film' in the strict sense of the term, the film works like a live memorial to the contemporary viewer – a memorial that constantly reanimates our
history/memory to pose uneasy counterpoints to the present and also very startling and disturbing continuities.

MJ Radhakrishnan’s cinematography impressively captures the varying moods and tones of the narrative and the mindscapes. The dimly lit interiors of Kerala houses and places like toddy shops have never been so evocatively imaged. Similarly, the skin tones of the characters. Likewise, Issac Kottukapally’s music is employed very sparsely but pointedly to subtly underline and evoke various motifs that run through the narrative.

The end of Naalu Pennungal is sure to remind one of Swayamvaram (1972). In Adoor’s first film, Seetha is also left alone, with an uncertain and gloomy future staring at her. The fragile wooden door between her and the outside world rattles ominously. In Naalu Pennungal, the fourth episode begins and ends with the pleading knocks of a man at Kamakshi's door. But the eternal virgin here is more resolute, for she holds no illusions about the world. The male world upon which she has slammed the doors is one where she knows she will neither find freedom nor fulfillment of any kind. Pleasure is still far away, remote and ever elusive, which is how the film makes its vital connections with the contemporary.