|
Release
date:
|
Kerala: July 13, 2018. Delhi: July 20, 2018.
|
|
Director:
|
Anjali Menon
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Prithviraj
Sukumaran, Nazriya Nazim Fahadh, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Maala Parvathi, Ranjith
Balakrishnan, Atul Kulkarni, Devan, Roshan Mathew, Darshana Rajendran,
Santhosh Keezhattoor
Malayalam
|
“Coach Ashraf was
the first person to ever pass the ball to me,” Sophie tells Joshua, on a gray
day up in the mountains of southern India. She is a rebel who has been paying a
price for her self-respect, and is grabbing a moment of solace here with an old
friend.
Joshua is young like her, but his
shoulders are slightly hunched under the crushing burden patriarchy places on
men. “Actually, I was the one who passed the ball to you,” he corrects her
shyly, before acknowledging that the coach had asked him to do so.
A lesser filmmaker may have
framed this brief dialogue such that it cries from rooftops, “See this, viewers!
See how socially conscious I am!” Producer-director-writer Anjali Menon though
leaves us to make of it what we wish. Read it, if you will, as an exchange of
inanities between two people hesitantly picking up the frayed threads of a
precious relationship snuffed out in its infancy. Or read in it thoughts left
unspoken – by a woman remembering a mentor who backed her when she took the
reins of life in her hands as a child, and by a man who may still not grasp the
magnitude of that moment but is glad he was in it anyway.
Koode uses words sparingly. Menon even cheekily
stresses the risks involved in this creative choice during the early banter
between Joshua and his sister Jenny, when he laughingly takes a swipe at her
incessant chatter and she shoots back: “If even I don’t talk, this will become
some kind of award-worthy art film.”
Jenny is what
conformists might call “comic relief” in an otherwise intentionally languorous
narrative. But to speak in terms of formulae would be a disservice to this lyrical
film. Koode is a remake of Sachin
Kundalkar’s Marathi venture Happy Journey
in which a sister who has barely met her brother while she was alive appears to
him after her death. Kundalkar is credited with the story and Menon with the
screenplay and dialogues of Koode. In
the Malayalam retelling, Joshua is the older sibling who was sent off to work
in the Gulf at 15 since he was floundering at school and the family desperately
needed cash to treat baby Jenny’s congenital, life-threatening condition.
The film opens with
an adult Joshua (Prithviraj Sukumaran) returning home on receiving news of
Jenny’s death. From the moment we first meet him, his entire being seems
enveloped in a halo of sadness. It soon becomes clear that Joshua has long
resented his family for destroying his youth. He is now resigned to a future of
loneliness but Jenny (Nazriya Nazim Fahadh) comes back and will have none of
that. Joshua is the only one who can see her, and she tries to help him see
beyond his fatalism and bitterness. Whenever she is on screen, she lifts his
spirits and Koode’s melancholic air.
Parvathy Thiruvothu
plays the schoolteacher Sophie, who was kind to Joshua when they were
classmates and on whom he had a teenaged crush. In a bow to Happy Journey, the coach they love is played by Atul Kulkarni who
was the lead in the Marathi original.
“Koode” means “with” or “in the company
of”. It is a word not usually seen on its own. By picking it as the name of her
film, Menon therefore seems to be reminding us that solitude is one of life’s
many acceptable possibilities and that relationships are worth having not to
fulfill social obligations but when they enrich us. The title is perhaps rooted in
Gandhi’s favourite hymn Abide With Me,
a Christian funeral anthem of sorts, a Malayalam version of which, Koode parkaan, can be heard playing
after Jenny’s passing.
So much is said
without being said, about fleeting acts of consideration that can alter lives, about
how a patriarchy that overtly stifles women also covertly smothers many men, about
the consequent silence around male child sexual abuse and the social opprobrium
a divorcee in a small town faces, about how financial independence gives women
the courage to opt out of suffocating relationships, and about the very human
fear that we are or will be forgotten when we are not physically around our
loved ones.
Menon does it all
in a film that is almost dreamy in its tone, with bursts of energy and sunshine
provided by Jenny and sections of the soundtrack. Raghu Dixit’s background
score and the songs – by Dixit and by M. Jayachandran – move smoothly from
languid to lively, depending on the mood of the narrative. Having listened to the
music in a loop since watching Koode,
I am not yet sure of its standalone appeal
for me independent of the film, but within the landscape of Joshua, Jenny and
Sophie’s story, it is a great fit.
The atmospherics of
Koode would have been impossible
without its spectacular camerawork. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where it was
reportedly shot, are nature’s gift to every gifted cinematographer, but DoP Littil
Swayamp serves us beauty even in grubby pictures. From that breath-stopping
opening shot of a group of men at an oil refinery to dreary desert sands to a
wealth of greenery to the actors’ speaking faces, everything is an opportunity
in his hands. He makes particularly good use of repeated aerial shots that,
apart from visual magnificence, provide some perspective on the lead trio’s place
in the larger scheme of things, which further serves to underline a point Jenny
makes about focusing on the here and now since the past is gone and we know not
what comes next.
Parvathy has the
most challenging role in Koode since
she has the least dialogues and the least screen time of the three leads. I
felt vaguely dissatisfied with the limited space given to this interesting individual, but
the actor makes it work, imbuing Sophie with both a sense of intense dejection
and a fire that marks her out as a contrast to Joshua:
he is mostly battling inner demons, hers are external.
The writing and Nazriya’s
acting often cutesify Jenny, but it is possible to explain this away as the
fallout of her being a sickly, much younger, possibly pampered child around
whom her whole family’s existence revolved as long as she was around. Though
this sort of hyper-bubbly girl is too familiar a sight in commercial Indian
cinema, Nazriya’s charm is hard to resist. Besides, Jenny provides a necessary foil
to the despondent Joshua.
The fulcrum of Koode of course is the scripting of
Joshua and Prithviraj’s brilliance. He turns his eyes into bottomless pools of
sorrow while playing this broken man, every line and angle of his physique
embodies the pain Joshua carries inside him, and yet whenever he is with Jenny,
the actor manages to lighten up and transition into an attractive young man who
has not, after all, forgotten how to laugh. It is a pleasure to see this fine
artiste so absorbed in a character, especially because Mollywood often taps his
stardom in films undeserving of his immense talent.
Of the top-notch
supporting cast, Ranjith Balakrishnan stands out for his sympathetic
performance as Joshua’s auto mechanic father. I did not quite get the cameo by Sajitha
Madathil as a teacher whose initial harshness towards the unwell Jenny is not
consistent with her later actions. On the other hand, Devan is cast well in one
of the film’s nicest satellite parts, as Jenny’s father who is, to overturn a
cliché, the man behind this gutsy woman.
Anjali Menon is best known among
serious cinephiles outside Kerala for her direction of the blockbuster Bangalore Days (2014). Critically
acclaimed though it was, I confess I am not thoroughly sold on it. Sure I
enjoyed it for the most part, but I found Dulquer Salmaan’s briefly stalkerish behaviour
and the othering of Nivin Pauly’s girlfriend problematic, as was the faux
youthful hipness of some elements in the film. I fell in love with her work
actually with Ustad Hotel (2012),
which she wrote but did not direct. The trivialisation and othering of DQ’s
European girlfriend was troubling there too, but it was a barely-there reference
barring which the film was a gem.
Koode’s vastly different storytelling
style proves Menon’s versatility. It also tells us that she is a mistress of
the unsaid. There are no banner headlines in this film so watch it carefully or
you may just miss that hand sliding down a body where it ought not to be, a man
in a conservative world reacting without judgment to a younger woman’s sexual
curiosity and adventurousness, a girl in a position in which we tend to expect
boys in music troupes, or the flash of a realisation that a woman at a steering
wheel in a vehicle in which a man is also a passenger is a rare sight in an
Indian production.
I might have preferred it if the concluding
scenes involving Joshua and Sophie’s stories had completely abjured social
conventions or been left to the imagination, but that is a marginal quibble in
a film that is, in its entirety, a near spiritual experience. Anjali
Menon’s Koode is a sharply
observant, occasionally humorous, emotionally stirring piece of cinema.
Rating
(out of five stars): ***1/2
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U
|
|
Running time:
|
2 hours 35 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Visuals
courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/koodethemovie/
No comments:
Post a Comment