Yaro Oral (1978)

Surreal fable about death. The gynaecologist Malathi (Protima) is childless. To remedy her condition she divorces her husband (Varma) and marries his friend Ravi (Raja). At the end of the film she gives birth to an eight year-old child just before she commits suicide. Her former husband tries to find salvation in religion, while the second husband dies shortly after his wife. The film begins with its main narrator (Siddiqui) shown as a corpse in a mortuary, who is visited by the second husband. The husband eventually replaces the corpse which gets up and leaves. This cynical, often absurd and deliberately anti-realist film has an art-house reputation in Kerala, known for Aravindan’s score and Pavithran’s debut which introduced to Malayalam a genre of personal cinema, exemplified by its several long, static shots.