Ariyippu: a plague on both your spouses

•  Reviewed at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.

How does poverty circumscribe honesty? How can you maintain dignity when your livelihood depends on the whims of those in power? These are the questions Mahesh Narayanan’s new film, the first Malayali movie to compete at Locarno, sets out to explore.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, a Delhi factory making rubber gloves finds itself severely understaffed. Factory employees Hareesh (Kunchacko Boban) and Reshmi (Divya Prabha) are a married couple who have left their home in Kerala to find work; only just eking out a living in Delhi, they are trying to leave the country altogether. As part of their visa application, Hareesh films a short video on his phone, demonstrating Reshmi’s skills in the factory. But when Hareesh has an argument with a fellow worker, the man leaks the video on the internet along with another clip that appears to show Reshmi engaged in a sex act with an unidentified man. Reshmi protests she’s not the woman in the video; Hareesh attempts to seek justice from the police, but finds them hostile, and pressure builds to buckle his attempt to get the truth.

Narayanan’s film is at once topical and as old as the hills: a morality tale from a year of the plague. The hallmarks of the pandemic are visible throughout. How and when characters wear masks become indicators of who they are: Hareesh always has his mask under his nose; Reshmi is more conscientious, and later wears it to hide. The town empties even as the factory making essential medical supplies churns on. Workers contract Covid and have to quarantine.

There’s a conflict between the personally devastating sex scandal and a broader, more consequential, seam of corruption as one of the supervisors discovers that the factory is passing off used gloves as new. The intertwining of these two plot lines is at times confusing – evidence of the corruption is also on video – but the general atmosphere is deliberately as murky as the Delhi sky whose constant smog provides cinematographer Sanu John Varughese with enough diffusion to portray the metropolis as a ghost city. More questions will be asked than answered, and when Hareesh plays detective, analysing screenshots like David Hemmings in Blow-Up (1966), what he uncovers is partial and unreliable.

The rubber-glove factory itself provides the film with its most striking images and a ready-made metaphor. Disembodied hands move past the camera in a production line, twirling and being dipped in and out of buckets of solution and dye. The hand imagery persists throughout the film – a ring that can’t be removed, a bracelet that might be an important clue. Despite such occasional heavy-handedness, Declaration succeeds in putting a new spin on a depressingly familiar tale.