This story contains spoilers for L2: Empuraan.
Let me get this out of the way.
Objectively speaking, L2: Empuraan isn’t a great movie. It’s bloated and over-the-top, it favours exotic locations over solid plotting or good writing, it chooses to make every sequence a slow motion “epic”, leaving the film no room to breathe .
And yet. If you’ve ever been aghast at right-wing violence, if you’ve ever despaired while reading the news, if you’ve ever just wanted a visceral sense of satisfaction to temporarily counteract all this – then I’ve got the movie for you.
By now, everyone within and beyond the Malayalam cinema-watching world knows enough about the Empuraan controversy. But allow me to recap: Directed by actor Prithviraj Sukumaran, L2: Empuraan is the sequel to Lucifer (2019). It stars Mohanlal and Prithviraj, and after it was released on March 27, social media went up in flames. News reports said the movie “allegedly” references the 2002 Gujarat riots.
There’s no “allegedly” about it. The movie depicts the 2002 pogrom, but without naming Gujarat, and all the very real violence against Muslims that came with it, with a chief antagonist pointedly named Baba Bajrangi.
RSS mouthpiece Organiser accused the movie of presenting an “anti-Hindu and anti-Bharat narrative”. Filmmaker and nationalist Major Ravi criticised the portrayal of Hindus as aggressors though he also said Mohanlal wouldn’t have known the extent of the film’s culpabilities. A Kerala BJP leader filed a petition in the high court seeking the movie’s ban. Congress and CPIM leaders, on their part, extended solidarity and turned out to watch the movie in the theatre, despite their respective parties being shown in a somewhat unflattering light in the film.
Mohanlal himself expressed his “sincere regret for the mental distress caused to many I hold dear” and said “such themes” would be removed from the film. Empuraan’s producer Gokulam Gopalan said he’d asked Prithviraj to “make necessary changes”. Prithviraj’s mother accused everyone of trying to make her son the “scapegoat”.
After much back and forth, 24 “voluntary cuts” were made to the film – a total of two minutes and eight seconds.
I watched L2: Empuraan in the theatre over the weekend before these cuts were made. My main takeaway, through the three-hour viewing experience, was that whether cuts take place or not, it’s almost impossible to dilute what the movie is saying. And it’s remarkable that it was made at all.
A not quite typical plot
Lucifer was essentially the story of fractured politics in Kerala after the death of a stalwart leader. His party, the ‘Indian Union Front’, is a stand-in for the Congress party and once he dies, there’s infighting about who will assume his mantle. An array of baddies aspire to the throne but there’s also our stalwart leader’s NRI son Jathin, played by Tovino Thomas and faithfully modelled on Rahul Gandhi (Jathin’s sister, played by Manju Warrier, is named Priyadarshini – leaving little to the imagination).
Mohanlal is Stephen Nedumpally, some sort of Old Faithful who was our stalwart leader’s right-hand man. By the end of Lucifer, he orchestrates a series of (necessary) killings to bump off the baddies and install Jathin as party president.
L2: Empuraan picks up about five years after Lucifer lets off. Jathin is Kerala’s corrupt chief minister, the party is in tatters, and Stephen is now Khureshi Ab’raam, the head of some sort of crime syndicate and tackling various ‘drug nexus’ gangs.
As in Lucifer, Prithviraj plays Zayed, Mohanlal’s sidekick and the head of an elite mercenary group that can shoot and punch its way out of any contingency.
This is very convoluted, but stay with me.
Zayed has a back-story that’s revealed in the opening scenes of Empuraan. In 2002, his family and many other Muslims were slaughtered by Hindus. I cannot emphasise enough how graphically this was shown – Muslim women and children slashed and sliced, a pregnant Muslim woman raped by a Hindu man (no filmmaker ever needs to show a rape scene this vividly).
All this is orchestrated by a man named Balraj Patel, later called Baba Bajrangi in the movie. It’s a most obvious reference to Babu Bajrangi – the man convicted in the Naroda Patiya riots, who admitted in a sting operation to various brutalities, who was sentenced to life imprisonment but got bail from the Supreme Court. Empuraan’s Baba Bajrangi becomes a top right-wing politician and Tovino’s Jathin decides to ally with his party, a BJP analogue, paving the way for the explicitly Hindutva outfit to make inroads into Kerala.
Young Zayed survives and grows up to be played by Prithviraj. Part of the core plot of Empuraan, amidst a lot of chitchat about syndicates and cartels and politics, is Zayed’s need for revenge against the perpetrators of violence against his family.
He gets it. Towards the end of Empuraan, Prithviraj and Mohanlal return to the site of the opening scene’s massacre. They face down Bajrangi and his goons and finish them off in brutal fashion. A key henchman, the one who raped a woman in the opening scene, is even blown up in slow motion.
Cuts can only do so much
Then came the cuts.
The card introducing the events of the riot has been changed from ‘2002 - India’ to ‘a few years ago’. Baba Bajrangi is now named Baldev. The rape scene’s reportedly gone (a good thing). They’ve also cut scenes of Bajrangi’s vehicle passing in front of a temple with a trishul in front of it.
Sure, it’s a bit watered down – but these cuts are not going to change the essence of the film.
Look, I’m not a Mohanlal fan. I came to Malayalam cinema late in life so I never watched Mohanlal in his peak, apart from the odd movie. As such, I was immune to his charm and appeal because I had no context for it.
Empuraan is a vehicle for Mohanlal’s star power. He gets not one, not two, but at least six ‘hero entry’ scenes – slow-motion swagger, music rising to a crescendo. In fact, there’s no scene where he just happens to be present, he’s always making entrances. There’s a tedious reliance on the letter ‘L’; it appears through fallen rubble, burning trees, all to really drive home that Mohanlal is Lucifer.
The movie also takes viewers across the world for no reason at all. We’re in Yemen for a scene where Prithviraj gets a two-second phone call – he could’ve been in Chennai’s Marina Beach for all it mattered. We’re shutting down Bank Station in London for a quick sequence that barely matters to the plot. We’re at a park in New York for a quick conversation that could have been a Zoom call. Even avid travel vloggers would be envious.
But all that aside, I’ve never before watched a mainstream movie where the protagonist is a Muslim child of 2002 riot victims, who finally gets his revenge on the goons who raped and murdered his family.
Meanwhile, we regularly get fiction passed off as fact. Like Kerala Story, which pretended that 32,000 women were recruited by ISIS and converted to Islam before changing the figure to the much more benign “three women”. These are movies that had the mighty weight of the state behind them – tax cuts, free screenings, even India’s public broadcaster offering its platform.
It’s impossible that Empuraan was made without Mohanlal knowing exactly what he was doing. Rumour has it that the social media outcry spooked him, triggering his apology. His capitulation is craven, the cuts cowardly. The film’s politics, despairing for the good old days of a grand old party, are questionable.
But there’s a rare statement being made here in a way that’s overt, explicit and deliberate. It stands out as perhaps the only mainstream film in recent times that shows not only the horrors perpetrated by right-wing goons during the 2002 pogrom, but those very goons facing retribution for their acts. For that alone, Empuraan is worth it, even with the cuts.
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