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Release date:
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July 14, 2017
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Director:
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Jis Joy
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Cast:
Language:
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Asif Ali, Aparna
Balamurali, Sreenivasan, Lal Jose, Siddique, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Shruti
Ramachandran, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Sudheer Karamana, Alencier Ley Lopez, Asha
Sarath
Malayalam
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Unni Mukundan
(Sreenivasan) is an academic who wants to make a film. Or rather, he has
written a script that he wants made into a film by the well-known director
David Paul (Lal Jose). And so one day when their paths cross by chance, he
grabs the opportunity to narrate his story to the stalwart.
Mukundan’s imagination
transports Paul away from their meeting place to the town of Payyanur in Kerala’s
Kannur district where Amal (Asaf Ali) is battling heartbreak. His girlfriend
has ditched him to marry a man her family considers a better prospect, and Amal
decides to get a fresh start in life. He relocates to work as a door-to-door
salesperson elsewhere and encounters a motley bunch of new characters, among
them a spunky fellow salesperson (played by Aparna Balamurali) who is more than
she appears to be; an aspiring actor (Dharmajan Bolgatty) who sustains himself
for now doing small-time ads; a writer of tacky dialogues and lyrics for the
Malayalam dubbing of Telugu blockbusters (Siddique); and a man desperate to
avenge his father’s betrayal at the hands of a treacherous business partner
(Sudheer Karamana).
Sunday Holiday – directed by Jis Joy who earlier
made 2013’s Bicycle Thieves – is clearly
designed as slice-of-life cinema. In keeping with that ambition, it gets its
tone right in large parts. The storytelling style is natural and realistic until
the director’s faith in his chosen genre falters glaringly when he needlessly
inserts a nightclub song-and-dance into the proceedings, no doubt to give Asif
Ali an opportunity to show off his dancing skills and possibly to appease viewers
with a taste for formulae. The result of that jarring passage is a break in the
flow of the narrative.
The film’s multiple
characters are projected as ordinary people, but each in their own way is not.
The pain of a jilted lover is no less agonising to him just because he happens
to be a non-entity to you and me. A professionally ambitious woman living alone
in a conservative community is no less a heroine than the Manju Warriers and Nayantharas
of the world in their on- and off-screen avatars. Sunday Holiday then is about the extraordinariness in everydayness.
Malayalam
cinema has been delivering a string of on-point films of this nature, with last
year’s Maheshinte Prathikaaram and
the current rage, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, being among the highlights of the lot. To have been a
contender to their crown, Sunday Holiday
needed stronger writing. While it has its basics in place, once the initial
charm wears off, it is hard to ignore the fact that it lacks flesh and depth.
On the plus side, Mukundan’s
narration is never stretched so long as to take away from the pull of Amal’s
story – the (primary) film within this film – but on the downside, his ‘secret’,
revealed in the end, is a needless addition to the plot and one that is almost
silly.
Let us not mistake superficiality
for simplicity, and loose ends for an open ending. Sunday Holiday does. Too often. A murderous attack on a significant
character, for instance, is left casually unreported to the police. One of the
characters gets away with a heist that is massive in his circumstances – while
the manner in which that happens is not entirely impossible, what defies believability
is that family members of the culprit, who are presented as decent folk, do not
bat an eyelid when they discover his crime. And several
characters fail to rise above a single defining characteristic.
The cast is
packed with talented character artistes. Leading man Asif Ali is likeable as
always but is yet to develop the charisma to carry the weight of an entire film
on his shoulders. Aparna Balamurali, on the other hand, looks like she might,
if only male-centric Mollywood would give her a chance. This youngster, who shone
in supporting roles in Maheshinte Prathikaaram
and Oru Muthassi Gadha last year, has the words “star material” written all over her, and
deserves to be seen in films revolving around the character she plays.
As Anu, Balamurali
lifts Sunday Holiday each time she
appears on screen. If there was more of her in the film, it might even have
been saved from its intermittent blandness.
That
blandness arises largely from an overall lack of novelty. The traitorous female
lover, the hapless male lover and all-male drinking sessions – familiar motifs
from a vast majority of Malayalam films – play a substantial role here. They are
a reminder of the extreme gender segregation in Kerala society and the
anti-women prejudice that is its direct consequence – but these are
unintentional insights (and the fact that they are unintentional on the part of
Joy and so many other directors, including some seemingly progressive ones, just
goes to show how deep-rooted these problems are).
That said, while
Sunday Holiday offers little that is
new, the good thing is that it is unpretentious. It is sometimes sweet, more often flat, at no point insufferable but never
earth-shattering either. Having seen it once, I’d say it is watchable but
thoroughly forgettable fare.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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135 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/sundayholidaymovie/
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