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Release date:
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Kerala: February 23, 2017.
All India: March 3.
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Director:
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Srikant Murali
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Cast:
Language:
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Vineeth
Sreenivasan, Mareena Michael, Sudheer Karamana, Vineetha Koshy, Aju Varghese,
Suraj Venjaramoodu, Manish Choudhary
Malayalam
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If good intentions were all it took to make a good film, then
cinephiles would be a much happier lot. Director Srikant Murali’s Aby,
without question, has its heart in the right place. The problem with that
heart? It struggles to beat.
Vineeth Sreenivasan
plays Aby, a young man in rural Kerala who was born socially inept and seemingly mentally slow but turns out to be a scientifically
inclined prodigy. From his early childhood, Aby has wanted to fly. Like Icarus
and others before him, over the years he takes a string of uninformed risks to
fulfill his dream. When he starts building a plane as an adult, he gets backing
from unexpected quarters – but not from his father.
Aby’s mental
challenge is compounded by his life-long troubles with that father (Sudheer
Karamana), a violent alcoholic who is responsible for the premature death of
the boy’s mother (Vineetha Koshy). The film is about Aby’s aspiration and the
support he finds along the way from an array of people including kindly
strangers, the woman he loves, Anumol (Mareena Michael), and a struggling,
drunken businessman (Manish Choudhary) in Bengaluru.
In short, this is a
story of a man-child who struggles to reach the sky and those who are able to
look past his disability to spot the genius within.
A promising
premise, no doubt, but one that – unlike the leading man – never lifts off. The
early scenes featuring little Aby, his beleaguered mother and cruel father are
the highlight of the film. A large part of the credit for this must go to the
three actors involved, especially the impressive child artiste Vasudev. These
introductory passages evoke empathy for the kid and establish an appropriately
sombre mood, but wait as you might for this flight to take off, it does not.
Director Srikant
Murali’s narrative is too languid to hold interest, and Sreenivasan is trying
too hard to be cute, making this an unintentionally patronising take on a PwD
(person with disability). The rest of the cast – especially Michael and
Karamana – are strong, but when the lynchpin is wobbly, what can the best of
performers do?
Santhosh
Aechikkanam’s writing meanders as much as Murali’s directorial choices.
Particularly odd is the conceptualisation of GK and the inexplicable casting of
Bollywood actor Manish Choudhary rather than a Mollywood actor to play him.
Apart from the hero’s father, GK is the only person with a commanding presence
in Aby; in a film where every single
primary character is Malayali, he is not one; he appears to be north Indian and
speaks a mix of Malayalam, Hindi and English, attracting awed whispers from
locals when he visits Aby’s village, an assumption on sight that he is a “veliya” (big) man, and by his mere
presence disrupting the equanimity of the authorities who are, at that point,
trying to stop Aby from flying.
In the unlikely
scenario that Murali is using GK’s character to make a larger point about how
Malayalis look up to north Indians, that point is lost here. Since the idea of
an outsider from the big city automatically getting respect from a rural
populace could as well have been conveyed with a Malayali character, it seems
like Murali himself is unwittingly revealing his own reverence towards Hindi-bhaashis here.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps he just likes Choudhary and wanted to cast him in the film. I have no
idea. Point is, the film’s problems are exemplified by this episode: it is
inconsistent (the humane GK suddenly turns selfish and ferociously against Aby
for no reason), it lacks detailing (the satellite characters are poorly fleshed
out and consequently unappealing), it does not make the science interesting
(try watching the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures currently in theatres, to understand how a filmmaker might build
highly relatable scenes around mathematics that the average viewer would
obviously be clueless about), it is ungainly, vague and all over the place.
So is the
film.
Aby proves that the road to hell is not the only one
paved with good intentions. So too is the road to ordinariness.
Rating
(out of five): *
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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133 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
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