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Green, Aruvi, Yellow and others.
We watch films, get over it by the time we try to recollect the pocket in which we stuffed our parking ticket into. Some films stay with us on our drive back home, some over the weekend, some till the next week, the week after that and so on. Aruvi was one such film that I had to forcefully push out of my thoughts, stop listening to its music and stop watching its interviews to move on, literally.
The film starts with chaos where our lead girl is under police custody and the first dialogue she utters is, “Emily, I just anticipated this rain”. Why would someone be anticipating rain and getting dragged into an ambulance after being beaten-up at the same time?
Filmmakers want us to respond to a scene in a precise manner. Thoughts and ideas are injected into our brains and the mood is set. Color theory in films makes this pretty easier.
Let us assume the purpose of each colour as follows:
Green: nature, associated with money, the financial world and progress.
Yellow: unstable and spontaneous.
Red: danger.
Blue: flow, water and travel.
Wait, Aruvi is in a green and yellow medleyed outfit in most of the scenes. Does that mean SPONTANEOUS ESCAPISM FROM THE MONEY MINDED WORLD THAT CHASES PROGRESS? Isn’t that the essence of the longest dialogue in the film? Let’s see.
If you think the dialogue is irrelevant to the film, Aruvi tears up twice for issues which are hooked up to financial impotency.
Aruvi, which means waterfall in Tamil, is seen in white clothes during her younger days pointing to the noble origin of a humongous waterfall, whereas the green and yellow looks like sunshine above a lush green forest.
In this frame, her father with a blue comb brushing the lice off her hair can be compared to the stream originating from soft rocks and the blue backdrop to the rain shedding sky.
The portrayal of Aruvi with pink and white blended colours in the segments showing her growing up through school days resembles a simple stream with fallen flowers afloat.
I absolutely admired the use of red in the scene in which we are later exposed to the cause of her disease.
Constant shades of blue can be seen around Aruvi after the introduction of Emily. The very first frame has tangled yellow and blue coloured wires on a table whereas the second one has yellow and blue colours scattered in the frame.
As their bond gets stronger, we are easily made to believe so when we see footages of these two women wearing outfits of associated colours. There are other points too, like the numerous frames based on doors, the poetic film language and the fact that nobody dies, where the director boasts that he was mentored by Balu Mahendra.
Getting back to the green and yellow combination shots, we get to see Aruvi in it during the complete reality show drama and a lot of other solo scenes.
It is not only the colour green but also the term green that the makers decided to play along with Aruvi. The first serious conversation Emily has with Aruvi is about a lost “pacha jatti”(green panties).
In the portion where Aruvi decides to take the power of control and play truth or dare with her hostages, she plays it on a green table with Subash rotating the bottle for her.
Yet again, Aruvi gets to be in green during the police investigation.
The director of the reality show is shown in a black shirt with a green tag around his neck. This could symbolise the darkness in him held by a green leash of greed for TRP.
Tiny details like Aruvi’s friend addressing her father in Malayalam, reflecting the notable population of Keralites in the Madras Christian College is one of the factors that pulled me into the film repeatedly in search of other details. I also noticed that Peter smokes a cigarette that burns to a small one and then grows to be a new one and then burns down in the matter of three shots that occurs within five seconds. Magic cigarette? :P
A crisp shot shows us Aruvi crying on one side with her grandfather’s photograph on the other side. Is this the moment she decides to take his gun with her whenever she decides to leave the house? You would notice how eventually this happens soon in the movie.
Copious impressive elements like staging during the truth or dare session, edit patterns practiced, colors adopted for the scene in which she asks her father to quit smoking and the irony of Aruvi not sharing a sanitary pad with her classmate, to having Emily wipe her bed at the aids camp almost made Aruvi a complete film.
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