Sillu Karupatti (2019)

Movies like Sillu Karupatti (சில்லுக் கருப்பட்டி) are rare and they make Tamil cinema proud. The film by Director Halitha Shameem is an anthology of four individual stories – each from the everyday life of ordinary people from various walks of life.

1. The first story is about a boy living in the slums near River Cooum, who earns his living by rummaging through the city’s waste dump yard. One day, he finds a ‘Pink’ trash bag and he finds something in that.
2. The second was about a young meme’s creator who is diagnosed with cancer. How did he cope with it?
3. The third is about a ‘dignified’ love at first sight for an elderly gentleman from the moment he sees he a grandma enjoying a slide in the children’s playground with her granddaughter.
4. The fourth is about a married couple with three kids. After 13 years of marriage, the relationship loses it’s appeal, and how the couple handle the resulting tension with the help of Alexa smart speaker is the story. Acted well by Samuthirakani and
   Sunainaa.

For each of the stories, the casting was perfect. Watching the stories, we are struck by the Director’s attention to detail and her ability to capture the emotions of people and present it to us on the silver screen. She has taken care to present acceptable logic in every story, every scene to the next moves flawlessly, they don’t feel like coincidence or filmy, but gradual transitions that can in real life.

Each story is also centred around a theme or object: For the first story it was the Pink trash bag (if it was the regular black it would’ve been unbelievable), in the second it was a shared taxi ride between strangers, the third had senior-citizen master health checkup and in the last it was

The dialogues too were natural and brief. In the first story, the boy gets worried to help someone and his little friend says “நியாபகம் வெச்சுக்கோ, நீ நல்லதுப் பண்ண போற, ஏன் பயப்படர?”. In the second the protagonist, a meme’s creator says to a politician who wants to hire him “ஆபிஸ் Work stressஐ குறைக்கத் தான் இந்த மீம்ஸ் எல்லாம், இதுல்ல இவ்வளவு பிரச்சனை இருக்கும் தெரியாது”, For which he gets a reply “நீ மாச சம்பளம் வாங்கறவன், இதற்கு மேல் நான் சொன்ன உனக்கு புரியாது”. In the fourth story, the husband calls his wife, with her hands full she answers the phone and it falls in the sambar she is serving to the kids, one of the kids shouts to his daddy “அப்பா, போன் சாம்பார்ல விழுந்திடுச்சு, உப்பு, காரமெல்லாம் சரியா இருக்கா சொல்லுங்க!”.

The film is available on Netflix India.

Scenes from the film