I remember I was sitting on a wooden bench towards the back of the classroom, paying close attention to my teacher. I was in LKG, around 5 years old, wearing an obscenely bright red uniform. My grammar teacher asked the class a question. I knew the answer. So, I did what you would typically do - I put my hand up and answered the question.

But Indian school culture doesn’t reward you for knowing the answer. It punishes you. I was told to stand up and was pushed against the wall. When I’d stepped away, my knees were bloodied and bruised.

It’s been fifteen years since this happened to me, and I still remember it vividly. And I am far from the only one who has experienced corporal punishment in India. Whether it be in the school system or within the family, the issue is generational and prominent.

The general audience of the Sydney Film Festival viewing Don’t Tell Mother’s promotion would imagine the film as merely a touching sociopolitical stance against generational trauma, or a reckoning with South Indian routine. In fact, the older Australian women that were sitting next to me could only capture the movie in one word before, after, and during: “tender.” However, when I walked into the Ritz to watch the movie’s Australian premiere, I went in with only one thought:

I am going to cry at this movie because it deals with something I have endured.

And that scared me. Not because it would mean that I would be relating to a film, but also because it would crack something open within me that I have been repressing. 

Though weirdly, that premise is not what made me cry during the film. Instead, it was our immersion into the world of 90s Bangalore. Although I am from Kerala, I have never seen a film truly capture the essence of my homeland like this. I felt like I had travelled back in time to being that five year old girl in Kerala again. 

One of the ways the movie successfully creates this immersion is through setting. As Lokkur himself said at the Q and A after the screening, the homes shown in the movie were the real homes of his relatives and family friends and the school in the movie is a real school. This choice adds to our feeling of being actually there with Aakash and Adi, the two child protagonists. A notable detail was what in Kerala we call a showcase, which is a see-through glass cabinet to display personal trinkets or accolades. Even the kitchen’s recessed wall for different types of pathrams (dishes) such as the steel tins for grains, plastic tubs for spices, tiffins for lunches and kallams for cooking rice, feel so authentic that you wouldn’t consider it to be constructed production design. 

There were also several specific religious references that added to the reality of the movie. Especially, the use of diegetic sound in the first scene encompassing the cyclical morning routine of Lakshmi, the mother. In this scene, we hear devotional music from a nearby ambalam (temple) as she wakes up which immediately took me back to my grandmother’s house in Kayamkulam which is near a temple. And in that sense, the sound becomes a symbol of female generationality. I know my grandmother would wake up to the temple sounds in the morning, and take it as a sign of grace to move forward with household duties. I know my mother would hear the temple sounds when she was younger, and run outside to hear it louder. Another captivating scene was when older family members warded off Evil Eye from the children by circling their body three times and figuratively spitting by saying “thu thu thu”. The running thread of devotion is further enforced through a repetition of morning prayer and cuts to the shrine in the family home for Hindu Gods. 

What separates this representation of South Indian custom from a TV show like Never Have I Ever is that it doesn’t use our lifestyle as some form of shoehorned-in media representation. Rather, the strength of the film comes from the seamless integration of ritual into the everyday, rather than it being something needed to emphasised. Even through Aakash and Adi not wanting to partake in some rituals (oiling their hair, drinking the milk that the palkaaran (milk man) brings for their mum to boil, and not wanting to give their papers to be recycled), that idea of refusal makes the representation of South Indian culture natural in a way I haven’t seen before in Western media. 

Lokkur’s interplay with lighting was also compelling. Particularly, there is a recurring motif of the stark white LED tube lights flickering, the current on the verge of going out. This could have been done as an afterthought, a frustrating reminder of the socioeconomic standing of the South Indian family. Yet, Lokkur has created deeper nuance by using this light defect shown medium close-up shots at an eye-level angle through to establish scenes of intensifying familial conflict. Specifically, Lakshmi’s reaction to the fading buzz of the LED lights going out adds to her characterisation. At the start of the film, she is more matter-of-fact with the issue to her husband. Nonetheless, her inner frustration towards being stuck in domestic duties later emerges through this issue; there becomes a shift in her tone and her body language around the rising action of the film depicted through her raised voice and abrupt, jerky movements. Consequently, viewers grow to anticipate the current going out as it symbolises a progression in familial dynamics, aligning with Freytag’s Pyramid.

The elements I have discussed entice viewers such as myself into the serious plot of the movie; by adding relatability and cultural understanding so much so that it could make me cry, the generational torment of corporal punishment was normalised rather than feared. With Aakash, this normalcy creates unease - we don’t wonder what causes his mentality, but rather how he could get out of the perpetual cycle of violence.

A particular scene inciting viewer discomfort was the portrayal of a religious self-flagellation ritual. We see high-angled shots of this ritual contrasted with the eye-level shots of Aakash, who is so curious that he climbs the school gates to see the action. This juxtaposition between the gory male violence that creates an abject reaction in the audience and Aakash’s seemingly positive interest towards it effectively shows how normalised physical abuse is at a young age. The camera shifts its focal point to the kid that is part of the ritual near the end of the scene which creates a somber atmosphere without being over-explanatory. In that sense, we understand how Aakash’s punishments for not having good grades and talking in class by his parents and teacher condition him to inflict similar punishment on his brother. The explanation for his corporal punishments shift from being abuse to an act of love and discipline to make it seem more acceptable. There is also a focus on the greater social issue of male strength and the “men don’t cry” attitude which adds to the normalcy. Hence, Lokkur allows viewers even outside of the South Indian context to understand how the cycle of violence perpetuates generationally with no end in sight.

At the end of the film, I saw my own mother reflected in Lakshmi. And within that also comes Lokkur’s critique on the problematic dependence of females on men in South Indian culture. By Lakshmi breaking out of her husband’s or father-in-law’s regimes to protect her children, we see growth in her characterisation. And through the slow subversion of her enforced cyclical domestic routine we see throughout the film, such as her learning how to drive or her interest in investing into her friend’s catering business, we see depth in her characterisation. A similar complexity is given to Lakshmi’s husband, Raju, who is not against Lakshmi’s independence due to misogyny, but his own financial dependence on his father. This discernment allows Lokkur to heighten the final scene of the movie, where Lakshmi abandons her business dreams to fight for Aakash. 

The scene itself reminded me of when my mum found out about my corporal punishment incident, and immediately went straight back into the school grounds. I remember the dialogue of my mother was the same, reprimanding yet emotional. Aishwarya Dinesh, the actor of Lakshmi, was truly able to capture the rawness of anger, frustration and despair of a mother at the injustice of the Indian school system through her modality. 

So, while I was a bit skeptical of the older Australian women around me summing up the movie as “tender” at first, I understand why they would. They were just as immersed as I was into the film but in a different way, with their own experiences of corporal punishment and gender roles. To me, however, the movie is more than just “tender". Don’t Tell Mother is real, raw, and honest, and as a South Indian girl who spent years searching the screen for home, I hope this movie paves the way for more authentic cultural commentary.