Megha Ramaswamy Interview: I am not interested in stories about men
At first glance, Shoby (Parvathy Thiruvothu) and Miriam (Rima Kallingal) seem to be having what looks like a mundane day, wearing their burqas with a heart pinned in the front, and speaking their mind in Mumbai where religious hatred is casually thrown at them every other day. This is, until they meet a young girl Lalanna (Nakshatra Indrajith), who shakes their core. Director Megha Ramaswamy presents this child, at the centre of Lalanna's Song (now out on Mubi), as someone who opens the protagonists' eyes through an unsettling tragedy. Megha believes that, along with her, every woman she has met is a Lalanna. "We all go through moments where we're pushed off the cliff by people. Some of us survive; some don't. The short Lalanna's Song is an homage to both—those who made it and those who didn't. But at its core, it's really about the women who were pushed off the cliff in the first place," she says.
Megha, who wrote Bejoy Nambiar's Shaitan (2011) and made her directorial debut with the Netflix film What Are The Odds (2020), confesses that although she wanted to cast Rima and Parvathy from the get-go, she thought they wouldn't be interested in the film. "Geetu Mohandas, who I was collaborating with at the time, introduced me to them. She suggested, 'Why don't you reach out to them?' It just clicked," she reveals. For her, magic wasn't just in the film and its surrealistic themes, but also within the actors. "Trust me, when I saw them together, I became even more ambitious about my project. They instantly understood the importance of making space for all kinds of women. With actors like Rima and Parvathy, who are so instinctively intelligent, you don't need to sugarcoat characters for them," she adds.
Shoby and Miriam are flawed, but strong women. They speak about men in passing and discuss sex and intimacy despite the stigma surrounding it. These were intentional choices for Megha, who shares that even though it is normal for all genders to have a conversation about it, she finds it interesting to explore the awkwardness men feel when women discuss this topic. "Honestly, if two men were writing a scene like this, they'd probably turn it into a rape scene, because that's how they often frame it. When men talk about sex in a populist, cinematic way, it often comes across as crude or crass. Women, on the other hand, can dignify their experiences—whether it's sex, violence, or the complexities of love in relationships," she says.
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