At the film’s end, there is an arresting final image of the Rifle Club as a collective protagonist.
It dawned on me when Unni Vlogs pointed out in a review that there is no one particular “hero” in the film, despite the unassuming jovial figure of Avaran, the secretary of the Rifle Club. The film is also the debut of Hanumankind as an actor, who is acclaimed in the world as a rap musician, and I think Humankind is also a poet.
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is known to have played with the collective protagonist. All for one, one for all. Especially in the Odessa Steps sequence. But, the collective protagonist in Rifle Club, is not the proletariat, but affluent Christian settler planters in Wayanad, who migrated from Central Travancore, and are well versed about the imported cars in pre-liberalization India, that the villains travel arrive, to attack Rifle Club. Awareness of imported cars before the age of the internet also hints at affluence. So the collective protagonist in Rifle Club is not a proletariat collective protagonist, but a protagonist of semi-aristocratic collective resistance.
Although the collective protagonist is a socialist storytelling method, it’s not always feasible in contemporary story-telling. Why?