The level of difficulty I faced to sit through this whole movie is as same as to write about it. Jallikattu a movie on a buffalo who runs amok when he was to be slaughtered on a regular ritual night, now who will get to eat it and be owner of it. Yes that’s jallikattu is about.
First let me make you register some things. 1. This is about Three villages — Alanganallur, Palamedu and Avaniyapuram – near the temple town of Madurai.
2. These villages wholey relies on fresh buffalo meat only which is provided by a butcher named Kalan Varkey who performs the ritual of butchering it.
3. This is a remote hilly village, the villages are so small and less populated that because of one buffalo running amok the whole village’s shops and home doors were totally closed. A local curfew!
The best part of jallikattu is it’s background music, it will take you to its own way, the jallikattu way! The first 20 mins of the movie is seriously harsh and very painful to watch for all my vegetarians mates, skip this part or you may vomit on your screens itself! The story of jallikattu unfolds in night and most of the action sequences are also shot in night only but very well cinematographed and present on screen, jallikattu seems to show less and say more, every scene has moral and influence. What I hate while watching is subtitles, subtitles can eat up your half watching of a movie, but poor me, I don’t know malyalam.
It has its lows, when a political person organises a party and on the other side some other village’s boys come to just have fun and party around didn’t got any influence of it, it was just to show the anger of the village people and info. spreads to the other village. The dense jungles and only one man having a gun, rest all having the butchering knifes and bhaalas (a long wooden stick with a sharp metal on the top to kill any beast), the no girl is safe in these villages scenes and the fight between Kuttachan and Anthony in jungle and firing up the jungle with rubber sheets are the highlights of the movie. The buffalo looks very real to me!
Cut to short, story of the story is that one buffalo shows you that not how one man digs a death well of himself but all of the villagers have digged it with him which led them to be animals themselves. The last scene shows exactly what humans do to each other when it comes to life.
A movie banned by P.E.T.A and Govt. Of Andhra Pradesh earlier in 2019 goes to oscars in 2021!