From the opening credits, when details of objects and textures of a house are delineated with a near-hallucinatory clarity against a soundtrack of a menacing bowed drone, there is a dark sense of unease in Rat-Trap, which takes place wholly in and surrounding a landlord's house in Kerala. The house belongs to another age, as does Unni, the lazy, taciturn ‘young master’ and the sole surviving heir of a decaying feudal family surviving on the increasingly meagre resources of its estate produce. His older sister Rajamma waits on him hand and foot; Sridevi, the younger, is studying at school and is drawn only reluctantly into his service. Barring occasional visits from relations and incursions into the courtyard with produce from the estate, the house is isolated. Within the house too, siblings have little meaningful contact with each other, leaving each in their own world – of ennui, of servitude, of study. Dialogue is spare and details accrue through the character’s actions, carefully rendered surroundings and personal effects. Even when characters depart from the house, their absence haunts the screen. Relationships between people are deliberately uncertain. At the centre of it all is Unni, bloated from keeping everything for himself.
One night, Unni is apparently bitten by a rat. Sridevi fetches the large wooden trap down from the attic, removes the cobwebs, greases it and primes it with coconut. “Watch a rat being trapped” she tells her older sister in a line that serves for the film as a whole. As the days pass, Unni withdraws completely from meaningful relations with others. His world contracts from village to estate, to veranda, to chair, to bed, his listlessness sours to psychosis and he becomes an unshaven, red-eyed, cowering wreck. By the end, the dissonant, jarring swipes of sound that accompany Sridevi’s trips to the pond with the contents of the trap have gained dark retrospective significance.
This is the first release in the UK of a film by one of India's pre-eminent filmmakers. With its assured direction and concept, Rat-Trap was awarded the BFI’s prestigious Sutherland Trophy for ‘the most original and imaginative film’ of 1982; it leaves you wanting to see much more from this unique director.
In Indian cinema, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is arguably the true heir to Satyajit Ray. The first film to bring him international acclaim, Rat-Trap is outstanding for its characterizations and detail. Set in Kerala in the early 1980's, the film takes a look into the life of a lazy feudal lord, unable to accept socio-economic changes, who subsequently falls prey to the metaphorical rat-trap set by his own escapism and arrogance.
Winer of the British Film Institute Award for the most original and imaginative film of the year in 1982.
Palms
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Rat-Trap
