The remnants of the city: Watching ‘The Leftovers’ : Valley Vision

Baaki Vannavar, or The Leftovers, has been released on the YouTube channel of the Potato Eaters Collective. Directed by Amal Prasi and Salmanul, this full feature length Malayalam film was shot at the cost of 12,000 rupees. Shot in a short schedule of a week, it was a collective effort of a group of like-minded people to produce a work of art. The film premiered at the International Film Festival of Kerala and received various accolades and appreciations from different parts of the industry. The film was produced under the banner of blue collar cinemas. Later, Collective Phase One acquired the distribution of the film. 

Focusing on the life of a delivery boy who’s also a postgraduate looking for employment, the film revolves around his everyday mundane acts. As the title ‘Baaki Vannavar’, or ‘The Leftovers’ suggests, the film centers its narrative by projecting his life as a cross section of the lives who are often left, neglected and ignored at the margins of everyday life. Henry Lefebvre, a pioneer in French Marxism, has been an influential scholar in investigating everyday life critically. Usually ignored since it is eventless and therefore not subjected to spectaculars, everyday was picked up and critically reimagined by Lefebrve as the site of active engagement, rather than passive spectatorship. In doing so, Lefebrve notes that the ‘everyday life is ‘in a sense residual, defined by “what is left over”. The film, in a different sense, encapsulates and materializes this idea by depicting the everyday through its residual remnants, often rendered as the leftovers of life. The urban everyday is often represented in films as an ‘aestheticized’ narratival element by ignoring its material contradictions. But ‘Baaki Vannavar’ takes this very everyday as its aesthetic and depicts the crises and anxieties of a working class youth. 

Here, the everyday is not taken as a mere backdrop, or an assistive realm for the spectacular event to unfold. But the everyday mundane of the gig-economy labor itself is the narrative plane of the film. The gig-economy, a new-found labor in the larger informal, socially constituted economy of urban India, is famous for its ugly forms of labor exploitation. Urban cities in India have become a host for such small-town immigrants who find themselves in the ephemeral economic promises of such employment. This form of contractual labor not only demands labor from the temporary employee, but a ‘refined, politically correct’ enactment of it. It is thus a web of moral obligations that creates a set of obligations, which are marked and scrutinized in the form of ratings, which makes these temporary contract laborers more vulnerable. This moral demand often blurs and hides the acute and actual material, economic contradictions and crises involved in this form of contractual economy. This complex entanglement of moral and economic lifeworlds is perfectly captured by the film.

This was made possible by the exemplary performance of Salmanul, who has the burden of moving the narrative since he is largely the sole, permanent figure in the narrative, where all others are important yet passive presences. Salmanul embodies the affective vulnerability to his body, while the narrative exposes the material conditions that create and sustain this vulnerability. The synchronized combination cinematography, editing and coloring of the film allows the film to blend into the pace and tone of Kochi, a rapidly growing urban city, while leaving many communities and geographies at the margins. The camera captures not just the peripherilities of the city, but the inner contradictions of it, often ignored in the aestheticized depictions of Kochi. The structured violence of everyday life is not depicted through spectacles but through seemingly neutral extensions of life, such as an interview, or in a conversation with an education consultancy. The city is thus revealed through its interiorities. The grim realities are often depicted through dim lights. The pace of the protagonists’ life is not represented with fast-cuts, but with an inertia that allows us to get disturbed, even if we doesn’t want to. 

Kochi and its urban expansion have been subjected to various cinematic explorations. Rajeev Ravi’s ‘Kammattipaadam’ was one such fine attempt to look at the lives of the communities and geographies that are often left behind, marginalized and thus often effectively render them as spaceless and homeless. Though crucial, this geographical exclusion is manifest in itself and therefore easily available for visual depiction. Such geographies on which the city later expands its capital development often turns out as slums, gullies and peripheries attributed with an a priori ‘immoralness’. Thus, an economic act of exploitative expansion seeps into the cultural formations, creating moral and immoral spaces. Thus, the tall buildings and MNCs of the cities are often the centers of moral fraternity; of happiness, richness and flamboyance while these peripheries are the spaces of quarrel, killings and bloodshed. But ‘Baaki Vannavar’ exposes this moral binary by exposing its very economic foundation. Here, even the only possible fraternity is founded on material conditions and economic necessities.  Thus, ‘Baaki Vannavar’ offers a poignant cinematic experience and leaves us not with vague hope, but with realizations.

Watch full movie here:

Afeef Ahmed is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.