Longing as a Gendered Landscape: A Critical Analysis/Before monsoon by Boseram
by Thanushri Rajalakshmi
In conversation with the creator, what rang loud throughout the exchange was that this was never about the subject or the creator, but about the resplendence, the reflection caused by the film itself. Both the creator of this film and the film itself, as an independent work, refuse to be simply a story. Aptly named before monsoon to show us the melancholic grey,the film operates entirely and exclusively through the fragmented accumulation of imagery, silence, and poetry. Rather than it being just the creator's stylistic choice, this becomes the film's fundamental aperture, through which longing is never merely told but wholly felt in the choices made, the discomfort of a frame held a little too long, the silences intruded by incidental sound, and the refusal to use brokenness as a punctuation point.
Contrary to what's used to describe this film in its synopsis, the lens through which I, as an audience, saw it was not as a film depicting yearning in a relationship but as a fragmented visual poem, composed intentionally but most times unintentionally, about the gendered loneliness the "yearning of separation" produces and the shaky visual grammar used to justify it. This shakiness shows itself most clearly in the vegetation motif: a visual choice so insistent early on that it promises symbolic weight, yet the film never quite resolves what that weight means, leaving it more felt than argued.Whether this unevenness is a flaw to be corrected in the reading or part of the film's texture, a film this committed to fragmentation cannot help but be inconsistent in its own symbolic logic, and that inconsistency becomes part of what it means to feel longing rather than narrate it. Longing itself is not coherent, so a film faithful to showing it shouldn't fully be either.
The long lingering frames first start as a comforting extension of the expression of emotions narrated, slowly curdling that same comfort into a confrontation of what we as an audience are meant to feel. The frame stops illustrating her feeling and starts exposing the vast, narratively built emptiness between the two figures. The technique doesn't change; only the viewer's relationship to it does. This is the film's sharpest formal move: using duration itself as the instrument that turns sympathy into discomfort, so that the audience's own patience is implicated in her waiting.
Both of them are left with the absence,Only one of them is made to visually carry it. He exits toward the city, an image dense with implied motion and future; his emptiness is permitted to disappear into that momentum, deniable, offscreen. She remains inside these lingering frames saturated with vegetation, expectation, and nothing else, the vegetation itself a kind of stillness her body is made to match, nature's cyclical patience standing in for a life that isn't moving forward, her emptiness made total and inescapable because the film gives her no life outside of him to vanish into. Her narration is the only thing that colors the screen, and the frame holds him only for sporadic moments, treating his presence almost like an intruder's; the same goes for the singular dialogue he holds. Even in the yearning for each other, she is forced to carry the weight of expression and not him, so much so that his voice in the narration is used almost like a jump scare, unexpected because we are so saturated by his absence. Their experiences of longing and yearning are not equal in weight, and that inequality, not the separation itself, is the film's real subject.
The sound and the complexity it brings here are among the film's highlights. The clinking of her glass bangles beneath her recited poetry, and the way the mechanical sound in his longing is consumed by the sound of the sea, are both instructive intrusions: their most private registers, verse addressed to no one, dissolution into ocean sound, are still accompanied by the bangles and the sea itself, markers of the social roles that bind them both. But as ever, it is made clear that her existence revolves around the longing she is permitted, the longing for him. Even art doesn't let her escape the role assigned to her. He, by contrast, is allowed to dissolve into something as vast and impersonal as the sea, his longing generalized and dispersed, while hers stays tethered to her body, her bangles, her single fixed direction of feeling. As the sea sound recedes, the film settles into its finality: the monsoon that's never realized like the regret the man now holds of the loss.The grey, pre-monsoon sky performs the same refusal on a larger scale, withholding the rain that would normally supply release. The film denies this catharsis just as it denies narrative brokenness as punctuation; there is no clean ending, only accumulation without resolution. What remains, in the end, is not a story resolved but a reflection left hanging, exactly the resplendence the film set out to be, pristine glass shattered in the waves of the sea to the sounds of unheard despair.
Things I didn’t tell amma - film by Megha J shetty.
Some art is made for the artist, some for the subject; this one was made for the world — This is simply a desperate call to the audience to wake up to the devastation left behind in the innocence.
What at first glance seems like a fastidious son castigating himself masked as confession, in retrospect holds massive multitudes. What surprised me most in this deeply personal confession was the sheer lack of shame in it. Both visually and lyrically, the boy holds no shame; we see this in his impatience, his imperviousness, and in his act of ignoring anything but himself in the way he preens, noticing the subtleties in his hair and his clothes, paying as much attention and joy to his hair gel as to anything else. We are conditioned to believe that shame should reside in the boy for his actions, but not in the conditions surrounding him and it is this inversion, subtle as it is, that gives the film its multitude of layers, painstakingly painted on even though the meaning beneath is as vivid as the sun.
This is a story of innocence, nurture, and the unabridged truth that we constantly refuse to see, both in ourselves and in the world around us: the cyclical nature of abuse.
The visual aspects lie in sharp contrast to the depth of the narration, as does the tone of the boy as he strolls past his confession to his mother like a droplet of water floating away from a leaf. As a socially conditioned audience, this absence of shame is what forces us to confront it ourselves, showing us that the social evolution we claim to have made simply fades away in the face of reality.
It is this same conditioning that makes the film's central move so quiet, and so devastating: the source of the boy's shame, the father, is made invisible. We are shown everything except him,only what his existence does to the children left behind. It is this erasure that lets the abuse become self-perpetuating, visible only in its effects, and it is what allows the whole beast of the ouroboros to take shape, perfectly, in these three siblings.
The eldest, the sister, is the unsurprising designated head — her existence marked by the emptiness of the bed, the blur in the company of the opening shot that we barely recognize her in. We, as an audience, are introduced to her first as the caretaker bearing the blame, and then as a half-existing background presence as the door opens, deliberately planting herself on the periphery of the story, the frame is almost invisible to us until it's broken delicately, by her screaming at the innocence presented on paper, until the line "is it because no one else in the house listens to her?" jolts us back to the reality that she is indeed a child herself here, a product of the abuse, contorting herself into the head of the ouroboros as a mechanism of survival.
The middle child, the narrator's elder brother, is simply the silhouette of the younger one — a shallow shadow lost in the fight to hold on to himself, now reduced to the consuming bystander, slithering silently, a designated coward in his brother's heart. His pain, consumed in silence, becomes the belly of the beast, only pouring out into the open as the short winds toward the dawn of his younger brother's breaking, him flinging water at the narrator, taunting him as a coward for not swimming deeper, only to have the accusation turned back on him: that it is he who is the coward, for bribing his friends instead of confronting them.
This is contrasted by our narrator, the metaphorical tail of the beast — unaware of the world, narrating his confession as a nonchalant stroll into the conversation, slowly letting the world around him seep in. The confession moves from a carefree composition of tone to one of confrontation, the opposing registers of visual and narration merging as we see the weight of both his siblings' trauma bearing on him. As the short reaches its finale, the head of the snake swallows him with her touch;his imperviousness to the world cracking as fear trembles his voice, coating him in all that was once shielded away, as the stained sheets envelop him, sealing his skin in shame.
Thanushri Rajalakshmi is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in the observation of life. She moves across mediums, letting each piece follow what she notices: the small gestures, passing moments, and quiet details of everyday existence that usually go unseen. Her practice treats looking as an act of care, turning ordinary experience into work that invites others to slow down and see more closely.
Deep analysis❤️
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