“Until she is there by your side, nothing will happen,” someone tells Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Dass in DC. This will to fight anything in life defines every woman in the worlds built by Arun Matheswaran.
Being Our Own Saviour
Arun doesn’t shy away from mainstream storytelling. In fact, he speaks about some of the most sensitive issues, including caste struggles and women’s safety. Yet he gives his women something cinema often takes away from them: agency.
In Saani Kaayidham, Ponni becomes her own saviour; in DC, Chandra first sees light through Dass but eventually becomes the one who leads with a torch. Name any woman character in Arun Matheswaran’s films; they are no damsels in distress.
Becoming Others’ Saviour
Perhaps these women aren’t just their own saviours. They become someone else’s, too.
Every character of his has an ethic, a purpose, and a determination of her own. Thaenpaasiyaar in Captain Miller isn’t shy enough to be the only girl in a gang of outlaws, rebelling against the government. Ponni doesn’t just avenge people who raped her, but those who killed her husband and daughter. Chandra might have escaped the four walls because of Dass, but she is the reason he not only roams freely, but is alive to breathe. They are rebels, burning with rage, armed with their own moral compass and protected by an unwillingness to give up.
Breaking the stereotype
It is as though Arun Matheswaran is set to break every single stereotype – not just of how she is written, but also of how she is looked at. Never once do his women characters simply surrender to their tears. Even when Velmathi learns that Dhanush’s Miller could be her husband’s killer or when Ponni sits in front of her burnt house, the incident burns rage into them.
And then there is the gaze.
The camera is always from the eyes of his female characters, so even when Chandra is forced into acts of prostitution, we only see the weariness of it – Not lust. Not voyeurism. Not the male gaze. And Arun, this shift might seem like a small detail in the gaze, but it changes everything — not only for the women on screen, but for every woman watching off the screen.
The Calm and The Storm
When Ponni’s husband laments how the rest of the world sees him only as a police officer’s husband. She is disappointed by his actions but doesn’t argue back; instead, she understands it through his eyes. It’s because Arun pens his woman as calm as the shore but powerful as the sea. Think of Chandra in DC. How her voice trembles when she speaks, as she witnesses the beauty of the beach over the years. And then she storms, like nothing you have seen from her before – from taking vengeance in her own style to saving her loved one.
The Avenging Survivors
Be it Velumathi in Captain Miller, Ponni in Saani Kaayidham, or even Chandra or Parvathi in DC, their stories are told with a wave of clarity that only a survivor can have. They aren’t treated as victims; never once are they shown helpless, nor are they mere plot points. They are people to whom bad things have happened, just like they happen to several of us. But what defines them isn’t what happened to them. It is what they choose to do after. They show the grit to live through it and make life their own, once again.
Perhaps that’s what makes Arun Matheswaran’s women so memorable. On our worst days, they become the women we want to look up to.